SLAVERY  AND  THE  WAR: 


, 
ILLINOIS  HISTORICAL  S08VET 


A  HISTORICAL  ESSAY. 


RET.    HENRY     DARLING,    D.D. 


"  Love  thou  thy  land,  with  love  far  brought 
From  out  the  storied  Past,  and  used 
Within  the  Present,  but  transfused 
Through  future  time,  by  power  of  thought."' — TJCNXISOX. 


\ 

PHILADELPHIA: 

J.  B.   LIPPINCOTT    &    CO. 

1863. 


Entered,  according  to  Act  of  Congress,  in  the  year  18G3,  by 
J.  B.  LIPPINCOTT    &   CO., 

In  the  Office  of  the  Clerk  of  the  District  Court  in  and  for  the  Eastern 
District  of  Pennsylvania. 


SLAVERY  AND  THE  WAR. 


FROM  the  commencement  of  that  internecine  war,  which  is  now 
raging  with  so  much  fury  in  our  country,  the  faith  that  it  would 
eventuate  in  the  entire  destruction  of  American  slavery*  was,  with 
many  good  men,  strong.  They  had  long  stood  appalled  before 
this  gigantic  national  evil,  afraid  almost  to  utter  in  words  the  sen- 
timents of  condemnation  that  were  burning  in  their  hearts,  and 
entirely  unable  to  see  how  any  exodus  was  to  be  opened  for  the 
enslaved.  The  problem  was  too  profound  for  human  solution. 
Girt  around  with  constitutional  defenses,  and  its  righteousness 
maintained  by  the  teachings  of  almost  every  pulpit  in  the  South, 
an  institution,  once  universally  confessed  to  be  but  temporary,  and 
destined  before  the  march  of  civilization  and  religion  to  pass  away, 
seemed  fast  imbedding  itself  indissolubly,  into  the  very  structure 
of  a  large  part  of  American  society. 

But  how  changed  was  the  whole  aspect  of  this  question,  the 
very  moment  that  this  great  national  sin,  in  its  vaulting  ambition, 
grappled  with  liberty,  and  sought  to  hurl  into  the  dust,  the  very 
institutions  that  had  fostered  its  greatness  !  Timid  philanthropists 
and  religionists  then  saw,  at  once,  that  God  had  taken  this  problem, 
so  insoluble  with  them,  into  His  hands,  and  that  now  again,  in  the 
eyes  of  all  the  nations,  would  that  prophecy  of  Christ  be  fulfilled — 
"All  they  that  take  the  sword  shall  perish  with  the  sword." 

Doubtless  at  the  outset,  this  expectation  of  the  final  issue  was, 
as  to  the  mode  of  its  accomplishment,  vague.  Men  walked  to  this 
sublime  conclusion  by  a  simple  faith.  Unable  to  believe  that  the 
purpose  of  God  in  permitting  this  rebellion  was  our  national  ruin, 
but  seeing  in  it  His  design  to  cleanse  and  purify  us,  in  what  other 
direction  could  the  process  extend  but  in  this  ?  True,  slavery  was 
not  our  only  national  sin.  We  had  other  evils  over  which  to 
mourn,  and  to  rid  us  of  which,  we  well  deserved  the  judgments  of 

(3) 


4  SLAVERY  AND   THE   WAR. 

God.  But  all  these,  individually  considered  or  aggregated,  what 
were  they  when  once  compared  with  the  single  fact  of  the  enslave- 
ment of  nearly  four  millions  of  people  ?  Are  other  demons  to  be 
exorcised  from  our  body  politic,  and  this  one  to  remain  ?  Is  God 
bringing  us  through  this  terrible  baptism  of  blood,  to  cleanse  the 
white  robe  of  our  national  purity  from  a  few  of  its  minor  impuri- 
ties, but  yet  to  permit  this  deepest,  darkest  stain  to  remain  ? 
That  would  be  a  strange  teleology,  indeed,  that  would  lead  any  to 
such  a  conclusion. 

And  this  faith  in  the  ultimate  issue  of  our  struggle,  cherished 
by  many,  the  very  moment  that  hostilities  were  commenced,  how 
wonderfully  has  every  subsequent  event  confirmed  it!  God  has 
given  us,  in  this  rebellion,  what  we  have  been  wont  to  call  dark 
days,  but,  in  reality  they  were  bright  ones.  He  has  suffered  our 
armies  sometimes  to  be  defeated  ;  but  our  greatest  moral  victories 
have  been  at  those  very  seasons  achieved.  What  if  it  had  been 
otherwise  ?  What,  if  over  the  defenses  of  Manassas,  or  through 
the  swamps  of  the  Chickahominy,  or  across  the  Kappahannock 
and  the  Kapidan,  our  armies  had  marched  to  victory  ?  Would 
not  the  Union,  in  all  probability,  have  been  restored  upon  its  old 
basis,  and  slavery  have  gone  on  for  many  centuries  to  come,  sus- 
tained in  its  present  possessions,  if  not  extended  by  all  the  de- 
fenses of  the  Federal  Constitution  ?  It  is  nothing  but  these  very 
defeats  which  have  rendered  such  a  supposition  improbable,  if  not 
impossible.  But  for  them  Congress  might  never  have  passed  the 
Confiscation  Act,  nor  the  President  have  issued  his  proclamation 
of  emancipation  to  the  enslaved.  It  was  the  successes  of  the  rebel- 
lion that  constrained  this  legislation.  They  were  dernier  resorts, 
extra-constitutional  acts — it  may  be — adopted  by  our  civil  au- 
thorities reluctantly,  and  only  from  the  necessities  of  self-preser- 
vation. 

And  thus  has  it  been  all  along  in  the  history  of  this  struggle. 
We  often  marvel  at  the  hot  haste  with  which  some  European 
powers  acknowledged  these  rebels  against  our  Government  as 
"belligerents";  and  we  can  hardly  repress  the  indignation  that 
we  feel  against  our  mother  country,  for  the  substantial  sympathy 
she  has  given  them.  Previous  to  the  outbreak  of  this  war,  no  one 
could  for  a  moment  have  imagined,  that  England  would  have  pur- 
sued such  a  policy  toward  us,  as  she  has.  But  recently,  herself, 
delivered  from  a  fearful  rebellion  which  threatened  to  tear  from 
her  one  of  her  largest  possessions,  and  to  quell  which  she  had  to 


SLAVERY    AND   THE    WAR.  0 

pour  out  not  a  little  of  her  most  precious  blood,  we  were  all  ready 
to  expect  her  warmest  sympathy  with  us  in  a  similar  peril.  But 
may  we  not,  in  the  issue  to  which  it  must  lead,  felicitate  ourselves 
that  she  has  denied  us  this  ? — ay  !  that  she  has  given  that  very 
sympathy  which  we  had  anticipated  for  ourselves,  to  our  enemies? 
Had  it  been  as  we  hoped,  the  sword  would,  long  ere  this,  have 
been  sheathed.  It  has  been  foreign  sympathy  and  aid,  together 
with  the  hope  of  foreign  intervention  and  recognition,  that  has 
made  the  leaders  of  this  rebellion  so  persistent  in  their  treason. 
They  have  not  desisted  in  their  mad  purpose,  because  voices  of 
hope  have  ever  been  coming  to  them  from  beyond  the  sea. 

But  did  many  good  men,  at  the  commencement  of  this  war,  by 
faith,  see  in  its  final  issue  the  destruction  of  American  slavery? 
Did  they  believe  that  its  mission  was  to  us,  as  was  that  of  Moses 
to  Pharaoh,  and  that  we  should  finally  behold  a  second  exodus  of 
the  enslaved  ?  It  is  now  more  than  faith  which  apprehends  such  a 
result.  We  can  almost  walk  by  sight  to  this  sublime  conclusion. 

One  of  the  profoundest  thinkers  of  our  age,  in  speaking  of  the 
relations  that  this  war  sustains  to  American  slavery,  remarks: 
"  I  cannot  see  how  any  Southern  man,  desiring  that  slavery  should 
be  continued  and  perpetuated,  can  be  willing  to  permit  this  war 
to  be  a  long  one  ;  nor  can  I  see  how  any  Northern  man,  hoping 
and  praying  for  the  destruction  of  slavery,  can  desire  that  the  war 
should  be  a  short  one."  The  argument  is  well  put,  and  no  candid 
mind,  we  think,  can  fail  to  admit  its  truthfulness.  Liberty  must 
follow  in  the  wake  of  our  invading  armies.  The  gradual  disinte- 
gration of  domestic  servitude,  is  one  of  the  natural  processes  of  a 
war  like  this.  Slavery  must  flee  before  our  advancing  hosts,  as 
darkness  flies  before  the  light.  Many  slaves  voluntarily  come  into 
the  Federal  lines,  others  fall  into  those  lines  from  necessity,  and  few 
of  either  class  can  ever  be  made  again  to  wear  the  yoke  of  bondage. 
Some  are  brought  under  the  advantages  of  a  partial  education,  a 
few  are  armed,  all  taste  of  the  sweets  of  personal  liberty,  and  are 
thus  unfitted,  by  a  threefold  influence,  for  future  servitude.  At 
every  point,  in  the  domain  of  slavery,  where  our  arms  have  already 
established  themselves,  the  process  of  emancipation  is  actually 
going  on.  A  flag  of  freedom  is  unfurled,  and  under  its  folds,  in 
rapidly  augmenting  numbers,  are  gathered  the  enslaved.  It  has 
been  estimated,  that  in  this  way,  more  than  one  hundred  and  fifty 
thousand  slaves,  have  already  been  made  freemen. 

Moreover,  where  these  influences  have  not  as  yet  been  felt,  where 


6  SLAVERY  AND   THE   WAR. 

the  rebellion  is  still  in  full  power,  the  necessities  of  war  have  re- 
quired the  resort,  on  the  part  of  our  enemies,  to  an  expedient  that 
is  itself  full  of  peril  to  the  stability  of  slavery.  A  very  large  num- 
ber of  slaves,  withdrawn  from  their  labor  on  isolated  plantations, 
and  in  quiet  villages,  have  been  congregated  in  cities,  or  at  other 
points  of  peril,  to  build  forts,  or  to  dig  trenches,  or  in  some  other 
way  to  aid  in  the  defenses  of  their  masters.  Will  these,  when 
again  remanded  to  their  quiet  home-labor,  be  the  same  peaceful 
and  willing  subjects  of  oppression  that  they  once  were  ?  Is  it  pos- 
sible to  conceive  that,  while  thus  employed,  some  true  conception 
of  the  nature  of  this  struggle  will  not  find  its  way  into  even  their 
besotted  intellect,  so  that,  ever  after,  the  North  Star  will  shine 
more  brightly  to  their  vision,  and  be  more  attractive  to  their 
fugitive  feet  ? 

And  these  natural  processes  of  the  war,  eliminating  slavery, 
must  only  increase  as  it  continues  to  be  vigorously  waged.  The 
more  the  wedge  is  driven,  the  broader  will  be  the  rent,  and  the 
deeper  down  will  it  run.  Old  centers  of  light  brightening,  will 
throw  out  their  beams  farther  into  the  darkness;  and  new  ones 
kindled  will  scatter  a  darkness  that  still  remains  unbroken.  Along 
the  Atlantic  seaboard  and  the  Gulf  of  Mexico,  from  the  mouth  of 
the  Delaware  to  the  Rio  Grande,  there  was  not,  a  twelvemonth 
ago,  a  single  point  where  freedom  had  a  home.  That  whole  line 
of  sea-coast,  with  a  vast  territory  stretching  away  to  the  north  and 
west,  was  in  the  undisputed  possession  of  slavery.  As,  however, 
by  the  prowess  of  our  arms,  forts,  navy-yards,  and  cities  have  all 
along  that  coast  been  wrested  from  rebel  hands,  they  have  each 
one  become — unintentionally,  perhaps,  but  from  very  necessity — 
free  homes  for  the  enslaved.  Events  have  daily  occurred  there 
that  were  never  known  before.  Labor  has  been  remunerated, 
ignorance  instructed,  and  bondmen  made  free.  And  shall  this 
process  continue  for  another  twelvemonth  ?  Shall  these  free 
homes  for  the  enslaved  not  only  go  on  with  their  great  work  of 
emancipation,  but  be  multiplied  all  along  that  coast  ?  Shall  Wil- 
mington, Charleston,  and  Mobile  be  added  to  Norfolk,  Beaufort, 
and  New  Orleans  ?  How  could  slavery  survive  the  potency  of  such 
influences,  working — at  her  very  heart — her  destruction  ? 

But  further,  how  disastrous,  in  its  results  to  slavery,  must  be  the 
simple  continuance  by  our  navy  of  the  present  blockade  of  the 
Southern  ports  !  Perhaps  no  country  in  the  world  ever  enjoyed 
so  complete  a  monopoly  of  a  great  staple  of  trade  as  the  States 


SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR.  7 

now  in  rebellion  against  this  government.  The  cotton  manufacto- 
ries of  England  and  France,  supposed  to  give  employment  to  more 
than  a  million  and  a  half  of  persons,  and  to  yield  an  annual  income 
in  England  alone  of  thirty-six  millions  pounds  sterling,  have  for 
the  last  twenty-five  years,  received  from  these  States,  more  than 
four-fifths  of  their  supplies.*  At  the  commencement  of  this  cen- 
tury the  amount  of  cotton  grown  in  this  country  was  inconsider- 
able. The  United  States  then  yielded  but  a  small  fraction  of  the 
aggregate  production  of  the  world.  But  ever  since  that,  the  quan- 
tity grown  here  has  been  rapidly  increasing,  while  that  produced 
elsewhere — India  and  Egypt  excepted — has  materially  lessened.  By 
an  official  report  made  to  the  Congress  of  the  United  States  in  the 
year  1835,  it  appears  that  while  the  total  production  of  raw  cotton 
for  the  previous  year  (1834)  was  900,000,000  pounds,  460,000,000 
pounds  were  exported  from  our  own  land.f  And  it  is  the  growth 
of  this  trade,  rapid  beyond  all  commercial  precedent,  that  has  en- 
riched these  States,  made  slavery  to  them  a  profitable  institution, 
and  given  them,  in  this  struggle,  to  so  great  a  degree  the  sympathy 
of  foreign  nations.  Indeed,  the  monopoly  of  this  great  staple  has 
been  the  bulwark  of  American  slavery.  It  was  this  that  arrested 
that  process  of  emancipation,  which  had  before  been  gradually 
extending  itself  as  a  great  tide  of  blessing  over  our  whole  land,  and 
which  wrought — as  we  shall  hereafter  more  fully  see — a  great  rev- 
olution of  sentiment,  even  at  the  South,  in  regard  to  the  moral 
character  of  this  institution.  There  is  much  truth  in  that  adage, 
regarded  commercially,  "  Cotton  is  King." 

But  already  does  the  throne  of  this  monarch  totter.  Already  ^ 
has  the  monopoly  of  this  article,  possessed  so  long  by  the  South- 
ern States,  been  hopelessly  broken.  Should  peace  be  restored  to- 
day, the  commercial  world  will  never  be  as  dependent  upon  this 
country,  for  her  supply  of  cotton,  as  she  has  been.  Other  sources 
have  been  opened  for  this  supply,  and  through  them  will  no  incon- 
siderable portion,  of  the  raw  material,  be  hereafter  procured.  The 
blockade  of  the  Southern  ports  of  this  country,  preventing  the 
exportation  of  cotton,  has  already  greatly  stimulated  its  growth,  in 
every  other  land,  adapted  by  climate  and  soil  for  its  production. 
And  let  this  condition  of  things  exist  much  longer,  let  the  supply 
of  cotton  from  this  country  to  England  and  France  be  cut  off  for 

*  Penny  Cyclopaedia,  article  Cotton. 

f  See  Woodbury's  Keport  to  the  House  of  Representatives. 


8  SLAVERY    AND    THE    WAR. 

another  twelvemonth,  and  what  though  then  her  ports  be  opened 
to  the  commerce  of  the  world,  other  nations  will  have  wrested 
forever  from  her  grasp  this  great  scepter  of  power.  India,  Egypt, 
and  South  Africa  will  then  supply  the  looms  of  Manchester,  Stock- 
port,  and  Glasgow.  Fields  heretofore  sown  in  cotton,  will  be 
planted  in  wheat,  or  corn.  Slavery  will  cease  to  be  an  economical 
institution ;  and  conscience,  no  longer  perverted  by  the  profits  of 
unrequited  labor,  will  instinctively  speak  out  its  abhorrence  of 
human  servitude. 

Nor  can  we  see  that  the  issue  would  be  materially  changed, 
should  we  allow  the  supposition  of  a  failure  of  our  arms,  and  the 
consequent  establishment,  as  a  separate  nation,  of  the  States  now 
in  rebellion  against  this  government.  Admitting,  for  argument 
sake,  such  a  result  of  this  struggle,  and  could  the  slavery  of  the 
black  race  long  remain  as  an  institution  of  the  new  Confederacy  ? 
Its  geographical  boundary  to  the  North,  wherever  drawn,  could  be 
but  imaginary.  With  no  great  rivers  or  mountains  flowing  across 
our  continent,  a  line  of  separation  between  the  new  government, 
and  the  old  Union,  could  exist  only  on  parchment.  For  fifteen 
hundred  miles,  and  more,  slavery  and  freedom  would  lie  side  by  side ; 
no  physical  barriers  would  separate  them.  Could  darkness  bear 
such  proximity  to  light  ? 

We  should  remember  that,  upon  the  supposition  now  made,  it  is 
highly  probable,  if  not  certain,  that  there  would  be  everywhere  in 
the  old  Union  the  most  intense  aversion  to  slavery.  Its  citizens 
would  rightfully  regard  it  as  the  cause  of  all  their  national  troubles, 
and,  instead  of  apologizing  for  it,  and  looking  kindly  upon  it,  as 
many  now  do,  all  would  denounce  and  execrate  it.  Any  provi- 
sion for  the  rendition  of  fugitive  slaves  would  then  be  impossible. 
Every  bondman  would  be  free  the  very  moment  that,  crossing  that 
imaginary  line  of  demarkation  between  the  two  nations,  his  feet 
should  tread  upon  our  soil.  Ay,  more  !  to  cross  that  line  he 
would  be  invited,  if  not  by  actual  legislation,  yet  by  the  warm  sym- 
pathies of  our  whole  people.  Surely  "  the  spider's  most  attenuated 
web,  were  cord  and  cable,"  to  the  feeble  hold  that  the  slaveholder 
would  then  have  upon  his  human  chattel.  An  early  morning  walk, 
a  quiet  stroll  at  evening,  the  leaping  of  a  fence,  the  fording  of  a 
little  stream,  a  certain  road  to  liberty,  who  among  the  enslaved 
would  not  walk  in  it  ?  Freedom,  when  brought  into  such  a  con- 
tact with  slavery,  would  encroach  very  rapidly  upon  her  domain. 
She  would  extend  her  lines  farther  and  farther  into  the  dominion 


SLAVERY   AND   THE    WAR.  9 

of  her  enemy ;  nor  could  the  process  be  well  impeded  until  her 
whole  territory  should  thus  be  gradually,  but  surely,  wrested  from 
her  grasp. 

Moreover,  looking  at  the  physical  and  social  condition  of  the 
States  that  would  thus  be  confederated,  do  we  not  see  that  many 
of  them  contain  in  themselves  elements,  that  could  not  long  be 
quiet  and  submissive,  in  a  government  built  upon  slavery  as-  its 
corner-stone  ? 

A  single  glance  at  the  map  of  this  country  will  show  almost 
every  Slave  State  to  be  divided  into  two  sections,  differing  very 
widely  from  each  other  in  their  physical  geography.  One  is  hilly 
and  rugged,  and  is  formed  by  those  two  mountain  ranges  which, 
running  in  almost  parallel  lines  through  the  center  of  Virginia,  and 
from  thence  through  Western  North  Carolina,  and  Eastern  Tennes- 
see, terminate  in  Northern  Georgia,  and  Alabama.  The  other  is 
level  and  low,  and  stretches  northward,  and  westward,  from  the 
Atlantic,  and  the  Gulf.  And  as  these  two  sections  contrast  in 
their  physical  aspect,  so  do  they  in  climate,  productions,  structure 
of  society,  political  views,  and  necessities.  One  is  adapted  to 
the  growth  of  the  great  staples  of  a  semi-tropical  climate ;  in  the 
other  the  cereal  grains  of  the  North  are  most  cultivated.  In  one 
section,  the  people — save  in  the  large  cities — are  almost  wholly 
engaged  in  agricultural  pursuits ;  in  the  other,  the  facilities  for 
manufactories  invite  their  establishment.  The  one  is  peopled  by 
large  landholders,  of  high,  social,  and  sometimes  intellectual  cul- 
ture, but  of  a  proud  and  arrogant  spirit;  the  other  by  a  compara- 
tively rude  and  simple  people,  of  limited  possessions.  The  one,  in 
its  political  policy,  favors  free  trade  ;  the  other  has  its  interest 
best  subserved  by  some  protection  to  home  industry.  In  the  one 
slavery  seems  almost  indigenous,  has  grown  into  gigantic  propor- 
tions, and  is  doubtless  pecuniarily  profitable  ;  in  the  other  it  is  an 
exotic,  has  never  so  firmly  interwoven  itself  into  the  structure  of 
society,  and  is  perhaps  pecuniarily  a  burden.  And  now  can  it  be 
supposed  that  this  latter  section,  this  mountain  region,  this  land 
along  whose  streams  are  slowly  springing  up  manufacturing  estab- 
lishments, this  land  of  hardy  industry  and  small  farms,  would  long 
submit  to  a  government,  that  is  wholly  in  the  interest  of  the  rich 
aristocratic  cotton-growers  of  the  low  country,  and  that  has  been 
established  entirely  for  their  aggrandizement?  Already  has  that 
part  of  this  great  section  of  the  South,  which  borders  upon  free- 
dom, asserted  that  it  had  no  sympathy  with  this  new  Confederacy. 


10  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

Western  Virginia  is,  upon  any  supposition  that  we  can  make  as  to 
the  issue  of  this  war,  indissolubly  connected  with  the  North  ;  and 
so,  doubtless,  would  Eastern  Tennessee  be,  could  she  but  have  had 
her  own  election  in  the  matter.  And  the  other  portions  of  this 
same  section,  though  for  a  little  season  drawn  into  such  an  alliance, 
could  not  in  it  be  long  retained.  There  is  not,  in  a  word,  at  the 
South  itself,  we  contend,  that  homogeneousness  which  is  essential 
to  a  slave  oligarchy.  Such  a  government  would  contain  in  itself,  the 
seeds,  of  its  own  dissolution. 

We  have  no  hesitation,  then,  in  affirming,  as  our  settled  convic- 
tion, that  the  issue  of  this  war  will  be  the  entire  destruction  of 
American  slavery.  Each  fact  in  the  unfolding  of  this  bloody 
tragedy,  has  only  helped  us  on  to  this  conclusion.  We  walked  by 
faith,  timidly  but  hopefully,  to  this  result  when  the  first  clash  of 
arms  broke  upon  our  astonished  ear,  but  now  we  walk  to  it  by 
sight,  boldly,  and  without  any  fear  of  disappointment.  True,  we 
may  be  slow  in  reaching  this  sublime  goal.  Great  social  evils  do 
not  .ordinarily  either  come  or  go,  as  did  Jonah's  gourd,  in  a  night. 
There  may  yet  be  many  a  convulsive  throe  of  this  hydra  before  it 
dies.  But  the  death-blow  has  been  given  it,  and  all  the  politi- 
cal revolutions  that  are  now  shaking  our  land,  are  but  its  dying 
agonies. 

With  this  deep  conviction,  we  propose  in  this  article,  not  indeed 
to  write  the  obituary  of  slavery,  but  to  seek  to  rescue  from  oblivion, 
some  great  facts  in  its  history,  that  may  afford  the  material  for 
those  who  will  hereafter  be  called  to  perform  this  office. 

We  will  first  briefly  glance  at  the  history  of  slavery  during  our 
colonial  dependence,  show  how  generally  the  colonists  regarded 
the  system  as  unrighteous,  and  how  stoutly  they  all  resisted  its 
extension  in  their  midst. 

Every  one,  at  all  familiar  with  the  early  history  of  this  country, 
is  aware  of  the  way  in  which  slavery  was  here  introduced.  In  the 
month  of  August,  1620 — a  little  more  than  thirteen  years  after  the 
first  permanent  English  settlement  was  made  on  this  continent,  and 
four  months  before  the  Puritan  colony  landed  at  Plymouth — a 
Dutch  man-of-war  entered  the  James  River,  and  sold  to  the  colo- 
nists twenty  Guinea  negroes.  The  additions,  however,  that  for 
the  next  few  years  were  made  to  this  number,  must  have  been  quite 
inconsiderable,  for  in  1G50  we  find  that  the  proportion  of  slaves 
to  freemen  in  the  colony  was  but  one  to  fifty.  It  was  not  until 


SLAVERY  AND   THE   WAR.  11 

James  II.,  in  1672,  chartered  a  company,  for  the  express  purpose 
of  trading  in  slaves,  under  the  name  of  "  The  Royal  African  Com- 
pany," that  the  institution  of  slavery  may  be  said  to  have  become 
established  in  the  Virginia  colony. 

But  all  this  transpired,  let  it  be  here  carefully  noted,  unsanc- 
tioned  by  any  colonial  legislation.  The  system  domesticated  itself 
in  the  colony  gradually  and  surreptitiously;  and  while  the  imme- 
diate demand  for  laborers  in  a  new  country,  doubtless  blinded  the 
eyes  of  the  colonists  to  the  evils  that  domestic  servitude  would 
ultimately  entail  upon  them,  yet  never  did  it  lead  them  in  any  way 
to  give  to  this  institution  the  least  legal  sanction.  Indeed  "  there 
is  not,"  says  Bancroft,  "in  all  the  colonial  legislation  of  America, 
one  single  law  ivhich  recognizes  the  right/illness  of  slavery  in 
the  abstract."*  The  colony  at  first  passed  by  the  subject  in  silence. 
Too  weak  to  utter  any  protest  against  it,  it  passively  suffered  its 
introduction.  But  this  silence  was  soon  broken ;  and  the  first 
slave-holding  colony  in  this  country,  by  a  long  series  of  legislative 
enactments,  uttered,  in  no  uncertain  words,  her  severe  condemna- 
tion of  that  very  system,  to  conserve  and  perpetuate  which,  she  is 
now  seeking  to  destroy  our  National  Government. 

But,  before  noticing  the  strenuous  opposition  that  the  Yirginia 
colony  made,  to  the  extension  of  slavery  in  its  midst,  there  is  one 
fact,  common  to  all  the  colonies,  which,  as  it  strikingly  illustrates 
how  general  was  then  the  belief  that  Christianity  was  opposed  to 
slavery,  we  will  do  well  here  to  mention.  From  New  England  to 
Carolina,  the  opinion  that,  by  consenting  to  the  baptism  of  his 
slave,  the  master  virtually  enfranchised  him,  was  almost  universal. 
The  colonists,  did  not  believe  that  a  man  could  become  the  Lord's 
freeman,  and  yet  remain  in  bondage  to  his  fellow-man.  And  how 
deep  and  general  this  sentiment  was,  we  may  judge  from  the  fact 
that  the  three  colonial  legislatures  of  Maryland,  Virginia,  and 
South  Carolina,  gave  a  negative  to  it  by  special  enactments.  As 
an  example,  we  quote  a  brief  section  from  the  act  passed  by  the 
legislature  of  Maryland  in  1715: — 

"  Forasmuch  as  many  people  have  neglected  to  baptize  their  negroes, 
or  suffer  them  to  be  baptized,  on  a  vain  apprehension  that  negroes,  by 
receiving  the  sacrament  of  baptism  are  manumitted  and  set  Tree — Be  it 
enacted,  etc.,  That  no  negro  or  negroes,  by  receiving  the  holy  sacrament 
of  baptism,  is  thereby  manumitted  or  set  free,  nor  hath  any  right  or  title 

*  Vol.  iii.  p.  409. 


12  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

to  freedom  or  manumission  more  than  he  had  before,  any  law,  usage,  or 
custom  to  the  contrary  notwithstanding."* 

The  crown  lawyers  of  England,  also,  declared  this  sentiment  of 
the  colonists  to  be  erroneous.  Yorke  and  Talbot,  his  Majesty's 
Attorney  and  Solicitor-General,  pronounced  it  lawful  to  retain  a 
baptized  negro  in  slavery ;  and  these  opinions  were  printed,  and 
widely  circulated  in  the  colonies.  And  to  this  same  end  was  like- 
wise the  power  of  the  Church  evoked.  Gibson,  the  Bishop  of 
London,  declared  that  "Christianity  and  the  embracing  of  the 
Gospel  does  not  make  the  least  alteration  in  civil  property. "j" 

In  a  case,  tried  before  the  Judges  of  the  King's  Bench  in  Eng- 
land, in  1696,  and  where  the  question,  whether  the  baptism  of  a 
negro  slave,  without  the  privity  or  consent  of  his  master,  emanci- 
pated him?  underwent  an  elaborate  discussion,  the  counsel  for  the 
slave  thus  presented  the  moral  argument  upon  the  affirmative : — 

"Being  baptized  according  to  the  use  of  the  Church,  he  (the  slave)  is 
thereby  made  a  Christian  ;  *  *  but  if  the  duties  which  arise  from  such 
a  condition  cannot  be  performed  in  a  state  of  servitude,  the  baptism 
must  be  manumission.  That  such  duties  cannot  be  performed  is  plain ; 
for  the  persons  baptized  are  to  be  confirmed  by  the  Diocesan,  when  they 
give  an  account  of  their  faith,  and  are  enjoined  by  several  acts  of  Par- 
liament to  come  to  church.  But  if  the  master  hath  an  absolute  property 
over  him,  then  he  might  send  him  far  enough  from  the  performance  of 
those  duties,  viz.,  into  Turkey,  or  any  other  country  of  infidels,  where 
they  neither  can  or  will  be  suffered  to  exercise  the  Christian  religion. 
*  *  It  is  observed  among  the  Turks  that  they  do  not  make  slaves  of 
those  of  their  own  religion,  though  taken  in  war;  and  if  a  Christian  be 
so  taken,  yet  if  he  renounce  Christianity  and  turn  Mohammedan,  he  doth 
thereby  obtain  his  freedom.  And  if  this  be  a  custom  allowed  among 
infidels,  then  baptism,  in  a  Christian  nation,  as  this  is,  should  be  an  im- 
mediate enfranchisement  to  them,  as  they  should  thereby  acquire  the 
privileges  and  immunities  enjoyed  by  those  of  the  same  religion,  and  be 
entitled  to  the  laws  of  England."! 

But  to  return  to  the  history  of  the  Virginia  colony.  Slavery, 
introduced  silently,  and  without  any  legal  sanction  among  this 
people,  was  afterward,  as  we  have  affirmed,  stoutly  resisted  in  its 
extension,  by  a  long  course  of  legislative  enactments.  Let  us 
instance  a  few  of  these. 

*  Act  of  1715,  ch.  xliv.  sec.  23. 

•j-  Bancroft,  vol.  iii.  p.  409. 

|  Stroud's  Laws  of  Slavery,  p.  67. 


SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR.  13 

At  a  very  early  period,  some  time  prior  to  1662 — but  forty  years, 
let  it  be  observed,  after  the  introduction  of  slavery  into  Virginia — its 
increase  in  the  colony  was  sought  to  be  checked  by  the  imposition 
of  a  tax  upon  female  slaves.*  At  first  this  tax  was  only  five  per 
cent.,  and,  to  avoid  the  jealousy  of  English  traders,  was  made  pay- 
able by  the  buyer;  but  as  this  did  not  accomplish  the  desired  end, 
the  duty  was  from  time  to  time  increased,  until  at  last  it  amounted 
to  four  times  that  sum.  All  discrimination,  likewise,  of  sex  was 
finally  removed.  Every  negro  imported  into  the  colony  was  sub- 
ject to  an  .impost  of  twenty  per  cent;  and  though  from  this  high 
duty,  amounting  almost  to  a  prohibition,  there  was  subsequently  a 
considerable  decline,  yet  this  mode  of  checking,  if  not  entirely 
destroying,  the  importation  of  slaves  by  the  imposition  of  a  tax, 
was  never  wholly  abandoned,  until  the  royal  veto  forbade  its  con- 
tinuance.f  In  1726,  Hugh  Drysdale,  the  Deputy-Governor  of 
Virginia,  announced  to  the  House  of  Burgesses  that  the  "inter- 
fering interest  of  the  African  Company" — a  company  chartered 
by  the  English  government,  and  who  enjoyed  the  monopoly  of  the 
slave-trade — had  obtained  the  repeal  of  all  laws  imposing  any  tax 
upon  the  importation  of  slaves  into  that  colony.J 

But  though  these  praiseworthy  efforts  to  restrain  the  slave-trade, 
and  ultimately  to  exclude  slavery  from  the  colony,  continued  for 
a  long  series  of  years,  were  thus  brought  to  a  violent  and  disas- 
trous end,  by  the  interference  of  the  British  crown,  yet  "a  deeply- 
seated  public  opinion  began  more  and  more  to  avow  the  evils  and 
the  injustice  of  slavery  itself;"  and  in  1761  it  was  proposed  to 
suppress  the  importation  of  Africans  by  a  prohibitory  duty : — 

"Among  those,"  says  Bancroft,  "  who  took  part  in  the  long  and  vio- 
lent debate,"  which  this  motion  occasioned,  "  was  Richard  Heury  Lee. 
*  *  In  the  continued  importation  of  slaves,  he  foreboded  danger  to 
the  political  and  moral  interests  of  the  Old  Dominion ;  an  increase  of 
the  free  Anglo-Saxons,  he  argued,  would  foster  arts  and  varied  agricul- 
ture, while  a  race  doomed  to  abject  bondage  was  of  necessity  an  enemy 
to  social  happiness.  He  painted  from  ancient  history  the  horrors  of 
servile  insurrections.  He  deprecated  the  barbarous  atrocity  of  the  trade 
with  Africa,  and  its  violation  of  the  equal  rights  of  men  created  like  our- 
selves in  the  image  of  God.  'Christianity,'  thus  he  spoke  in  conclusion, 
'  by  introducing  into  Europe  the  truest  principles  of  universal  beuevo- 

*  Bancroft,  vol.  i.  p.  173. 

•)-  Tucker's  Blackstone,  vol.  ii.,  Appendix,  p.  49. 

J  Bancroft,  vol.  iii.  p.  415. 


14  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

lence  aud  brotherly  love,  happily  abolished  slavery.  Let  us  who  profess 
the  same  religion  practice  its  precepts,  and  by  agreeing  to  this  duty  pay 
a  proper  regard  to  our  true  interests,  and  to  the  dictates  of  justice  and 
humanity.'  "* 

The  motion  prevailed.  The  prohibitory  tax  was  imposed.  The 
colonial  legislature,  did  everything  it  was  competent  to  do,  to  ban- 
ish this  evil  from  the  colony.  It  was  thoroughly  awake  to  the 
enormities  of  the  system ;  but  the  statute  was  immediately  vetoed 
by  the  English  crown. 

But  every  effort  to  banish  slavery,  by  the  imposition  .of  a  heavy 
tax  upon  imported  slaves,  thus  defeated,  the  Virginia  Assembly 
resorted  to  a  new  expedient.  In  1772,  they  petitioned  the  King 
upon  this  subject,  and  how  remarkable  was  their  language  !  It 
must  savor  not  a  little  of  fanaticism  for  many  modern  conservatives 
to  read  such  stirring  words.  Indeed,  with  what  is  now  trans- 
piring in  the  Old  Dominion,  there  is  nothing  short  of  the  verity 
of  history,  that  could  make  us  believe  that  such  a  document  ever 
emanated  from  such  a  source : — 

"We  are  encouraged,"  say  they,  "to  look  up  to  the  throne  and  im- 
plore your  Majesty's  paternal  assistance  in  averting  a  calamity  of  a  most 
alarming  nature.  The  importation  of  slaves  into  the  colonies  from  the 
coast  of  Africa  hath  long  been  considered  as  a  trade  of  great  inhumanity, 
and  under  its  present  encouragement,  we  have  too  much  reason  to  fear, 
will  endanger  the  existence  of  your  Majesty's  American  dominions.  We 
are  sensible  that  some  of  your  Majesty's  subjects  in  Great  Britain  may 
reap  emolument  from  this  sort  of  traffic  ;  but  when  we  consider  that  it 
greatly  retards  the  settlement  of  the  colonies  with  useful  inhabitants, 
and  may  in  time  have  the  most  destructive  influence,  we  presume  to  hope 
that  the  interest  of  a  few  will  be  disregarded,  when  placed  in  competition 
with  the  security  and  happiness  of  such  numbers  of  your  Majesty's  dutiful 
and  loyal  subjects. 

"Deeply  impressed  with  these  sentiments,  we  most  humbly  beseech 
your  Majesty  to  remove  all  those  restraints  on  your  Majesty's  governors 
of  this  colony  which  inhibit  their  assenting  to  such  laws  as  might  check 
BO  very  pernicious  a  commerce."! 

And  that  this  petition  might  receive  the  favorable  regard  of  the 
British  ministry,  some  of  those  distinguished  philanthropists  in 
England,  who  were  then  pleading  so  eloquently  the  cause  of  the 
enslaved,  were  informally  solicited  personally  to  press  its  reception 

*  Bancroft,  vol.  iv.  p.  422. 

f  Princeton  Repertory,  vol.  xxxiv.  p.  536. 


SLAVERY    AND    THE    WAR.  15 

upon  the  crown.  And  to  this  request  they  cheerfully  complied.  /  /  / 
Granville  Sharpe,  who  had  just  immortalized  himself  by  the  de- 
fense of  the  poor  negro,  Somerset,  and  who,  in  that  memorable 
case,  had  secured  a  decision  which  not  only  cleared  Somerset,  but 
determined  that  slavery  could  not  exist  in  Great  Britain,  waited 
personally  on  the  Secretary  of  State,  and  urged  the  righteousness 
of  the  petition.*  But  it  was  all  in  vain.  The  policy  of  England 
with  regard  to  slavery  in  the  American  colonies  was  fixed.  She 
would  not  suffer  it  to  pollute  her  own  soil ;  but  at  the  same  time 
she  would  force  its  acceptance,  and  extension,  upon  her  citizens 
abroad.  And  doubtless  unwilling,  by  the  direct  refusal  of  so  right- 
eous a  request,  to  manifest  to  the  world  her  true  purpose,  she 
added  to  her  virtual  rejection  of  this  petition,  the  indignity  of  pro- 
found silence.  No  reply  was  ever  made  to  this  request  of  the 
colony,  and  slavery,  under  the  aegis  of  the  British  crown,  went  on, 
fastened  herself  more  and  more  deeply,  into  the  structure  of  Amer- 
ican society. 

But  as  exhibiting  still  further  the  opposition  of  the  Virginia  col- 
ony to  the  institution  of  African  slavery — an  opposition  that  but 
for  the  interference  of  Great  Britain  would  have  certainly  issued 
in  its  destruction — we  should  add  to  these  legislative  enactments, 
the  utterances  of  some  of  her  most  distinguished  sons,  and  the 
incidental  references  to  this  fact  that  may  be  found,  in  some  of  her 
official  documents.  Madison  says : — 

"The  British  government  constantly  checked  the  attempts  of  Virginia 
to  put  a  stop  to  this  infernal  traffic."^ 

In  the  preamble  to  the  Constitution  of  that  Statet  promulgated 
n  the  29th  of  June,  1T76,  we  read: — 

"Whereas,  George  III.,  King,  etc.,  heretofore  intrusted  with  the  exer- 
cise of  the  kingly  office  in  this  government,  hath  endeavored  to  pervert 
the  same  into  a  detestable  and  insupportable  tyranny,  by  prompting  our 
negroes  to  rise  in  arms  among  us — those  very  negroes  whom,  by  an  in- 
human use  of  the  negative,  he  hath  refused  us  permission  to  exclude  by 
law — Therefore  Resolved,"  etc.J 

And  it  was  doubtless  the  memory  of  the  same  facts,  present  to 
the  mind  of  Jefferson,  another  of  Virginia's  illustrious  sons,  that 

*  Tucker's  Blackstone,  vol.  ii.,  Appendix,  pp.  51  and  52. 

f  Madison  Papers,  3,  1390. 

J  Stroud's  Laws  of  Slavery,  p.  37. 


16  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

led  him,  in  the  original  draft  of  the  Declaration  of  Independence, 
to  instance,  as  one  of  the  reasons  for  separating  ourselves  from  the 
government  of  George  III.,  the  fact  that — "Determined  to  keep 
open  a  market  where  men  should  be  bought  and  sold,  he  had 
prostituted  his  negative  for  suppressing  every  legislative  attempt 
to  prohibit  or  restrain  this  execrable  commerce,"  a  clause  which 
was  erased  by  Congress,  not  because  it  deviated  from  historic 
truth,  or  failed  to  express  the  sentiments  of  a  large  majority  of  its 
members,  but,  as  Jefferson  himself  said,  because  "the  pusillanimous 
idea  that  we  had  friends  in  England  worth  keeping  terms  with,  still 
haunted  the  minds  of  many."* 

And  what  we  have  thus  endeavored  to  show  was  true  of  Virginia, 
was  measurably  true  of  all  the  other  English  continental  colonies. 
"In  the  aggregate,"  says  Bancroft,  "they  were  always  opposed  to 
the  African  slave-trade,"  *  *  and  laws  designed  to  restrict  im- 
portations of  slaves  are  scattered  copiously  along  the  records  of 
colonial  legislation."}"  Should  there  be  any  exception  to  this  re- 
mark, many  circumstances  would  point  us  at  once  to  South  Caro- 
lina. Of  the  original  thirteen  States  of  this  Union,  she  alone  was 
from  the  cradle,  essentially  a  planting  State,  with  slave  labor.  The 
institution  of  involuntary  servitude  is  coeval  with  the  first  planta- 
tions on  Ashley  River.  It  was  likewise  observed  from  the  first,  that 
the  climate  of  South  Carolina  was  more  congenial  to  the  African 
than  that  of  the  more  northern  colonies,  and  hence  she  early  be- 
came the  principal  point  to  which  slavers  brought  their  human 
chattels.  Indeed,  so  rapid  was  the  importation  of  Africans  into 
this  colony,  that  in  a  few  years  they  were  to  the  whites  in  the  pro- 
portion of  twenty-two  to  twelve,  a  proportion  that  had  no  parallel 
north  of  the  West  Indies.  J  The  German  traveler,  Yon  Reck,  ia 
1734  reported  the  number  of  negroes  in  South  Carolina  as  30,000, 
and  for  the  annual  importation  gave  the  exaggerated  estimate  of 
3000.§ 

But  this  rapid  increase  of  bondmen  did  not  take  place,  even  in 
South  Carolina,  without  exciting  alarm,  and  without  the  attempt 
being  at  least  twice  made  by  its  legislature  to  check  this  evil,  if 
not  entirely  remove  it.  In  1715  a  duty  of  ten  pounds  was  imposed 


*  Elliot's  Debates  on  the  Federal  Constitution,  TO!,  i.  p.  60. 
f  Bancroft,  vol.  iii.  pp.  410  and  411. 
I  Ibid.,  TO!   ii.  p.  171. 
\  Ibid.,  vol.  iii.  p.  407. 


SLAVERY   AND   THE    WAR.  17 

on  the  introduction  into  the  colony  of  every  negro  from  abroad  j 
and,  although  the  alleged  object  of-this  statute  was  not  the  restric- 
tion of  the  slave-trade,  but  the  payment  of  the  colonial  debt,  yet  so 
evidently  would  the  former  of  these  results  follow,  that  the  British 
crown,  ever  careful  that  nothing  should  impede  this  traffic,  at  once 
vetoed  the  act.* 

The  other  attempt  to  restrict  this  trade  was  made  in  1760.  "From 
prudential  motives,"  the  Assembly  of  South  Carolina,  at  that  time, 
passed  an  act  forbidding  the  importation  of  any  more  slaves,  into 
the  colony.  For  once,  at  least,  her  eyes  seem  to  have  been  opened 
to  the  greatness  of  this  evil,  and  she  was  determined  to  rid  herself 
of  it.  But  this  act,  like  every  other  one  of  a  similar  character 
through  our  entire  colonial  history,  was  immediately  annulled  by 
the  royal  veto,  the  governor  reprimanded  for  having  sanctioned 
such  a  bill,  and  the  other  colonies  warned,  by  a  circular  letter, 
against  similar  offenses,  f 

With  reference  to  the  other  colonies,  it  is  hardly  necessary  that 
we  should  sketch,  with  any  detail,  their  history.  When  Oglethorpe 
and  his  associates  —  seeking  in  this  New  World  an  asylum  from  the 
persecutions  of  the  Old  —  settled  Georgia,  they  determined  forever 
to  exclude  slavery  from  that  territory  ;  and  because  of  their  obsti- 
nate adherence  to  this  purpose,  against  the  earnest  remonstrance  of 
the  government  at  home,  were  deprived  of  their  charter.  J  When 
Pennsylvania,  in  IT  12,  adopted  "An  Act  to  prevent  the  importa- 
tion of  negroes  and  Indians  into  her  province,"  and,  to  make  it 
effectual,  imposed  a  heavy  duty  upon  all  such  importations,  the 
statute  was  immediately  set  aside  by  royal  authority.  When  New 
Hampshire  was  separated  from  Massachusetts,  and  organized  as  a 
royal  province,  to  prevent  any  imitation  by  her  of  that  opposition 
to  slavery  that  had  from  the  very  beginning  distinguished  the  old 
Puritan  colony,  these  instructions  were  given  to  her  governor  : 
"  You  are  not  to  give  your  assent  to,  or  pass  any  law  imposing 
duties  on  negroes  imported  into  New  Hampshire.  "§  When  Mas- 
sachusetts, in  1774,  brought  a  long  series  of  legislative  enactments 
against  slavery  to  a  close,  by  passing  a  bill,  entitled  "An  Act  to 
prevent  the  importations  of  negroes  and  others  as  slaves  into  this 


*  Bancroft,  vol.  iii.  p.  329. 

f  Ibid.,  vol.  iii.  p.  416,  and  Princeton  Repertory,  July,  1862. 

J  Ibid.,  vol.  iii.  p.  416. 

$  Gordon's  American  Revolution,  vol.  i.  Letter  2. 


18  SLAVERY   AND    THE    WAR. 

province,"  Governor  Hutchison  not  only  vetoed  the  bill,  but  pro- 
rogued the  Assembly;*  and  finally,  in  1776,  "amid  all  the  agita- 
tions of  the  dawning  revolution,"  the  Earl  of  Dartmouth  addressed 
to  a  colonial  agent  these  memorable  words,  so  truthfully  expressive 
of  what  had  been  the  whole  policy  of  Great  Britain  to  her  American 
colonies  :  "We  cannot  allow  the  colonies  to  check  or  discourage 
in  any  degree  a  traffic  so  beneficial  to  the  nation.""^ 

And  here,  with  this  history  before  us,  it  will  be  interesting,  for 
one  moment,  to  inquire  into  the  cause  of  the  pro-slavery  policy  of 
England,  so  persistently  pursued  toward  her  American  colonies,  for 
more  than  one  hundred  and  fifty  years ;  for,  if  we  mistake  not,  we 
shall  discover  in  it,  one  great  reason  for  her  sympathy  with  those 
who  are  now  seeking  the  dismemberment  of  our  nation.  England 
has,  for  several  centuries,  been  a  manufacturing  nation,  dependent 
to  a  great  extent  upon  other  countries,  both  for  the  supply  of  the 
raw  material,  and  for  a  market  for  her  finished  wares.  Whenever, 
then,  her  citizens  emigrated  to  other  lands,  and  English  colonies 
were  there  formed,  it  was  clearly  for  her  interest  that  their  inhab- 
itants should  be  mainly  engaged  in  agricultural  pursuits.  For 
should  it  be  otherwise,  should  they  become  a  manufacturing  people, 
they  would  evidently  be  brought  into  competition  with  her.  Plant- 
ing colonies  would  minister  to  the  wealth  of  England.  They 
would,  at  the  same  time,  be  to  her  sources  of  supply,  and  channels 
for  disbursement.  Manufacturing  colonies  would  tend  to  her  pov- 
erty. They  would  lessen  the  demand  for  the  products  of  her 
looms,  by  furnishing  to  the  market  their  own  goods. 

But  in  no  way  could  this  end  be  better  secured  than  by  the  estab- 
lishment in  her  colonies  of  African  slavery.  Such  an  institution 
could  hardly  exist,  save  among  an  agricultural  people.  The  intel- 
ligence and  industry  that  successful  manufacturing  establishments 
require,  are  incompatible  with  labor  that  is  constrained  and  uncom- 
pensated.  A  race  scarcely  half  civilized,  may,  by  the  lash,  be  com- 
pelled to  dig  and  to  plow,  but  the  task  is  not  so  easy  when  the  labor 
is  transferred  from  the  field  to  the  factory.  Skillful  artisans  may, 
indeed,  be  occasionally  found  wearing  the  chains  of  slavery,  but  the 
instances  are  rare,  and  the  experiment  dangerous  to  a  continued 
bondage.  And,  perhaps,  we  may  here  venture,  without  any  fear  of 
contradiction,  to  assert  that  a  whole  nation  of  artisans  could  not 

*  Princeton  Repertory,  July,  1862. 
f  Bancroft,  vol.  iii.  p.  416. 


SLAVERY   AND   THE    WAR.  19 

be  long  retained  in  involuntary  servitude.  It  was,  therefore,  to 
constrain  the  American  colonies  to  become  planting  colonies,  and 
thus  guard  her  own  manufactories  from  competition,  that  England 
sought  so  persistently  to  fill  them  with  negroes. 

And  to  the  same  cause,  as  we  have  already  intimated,  are  we  in 
a  measure,  to  attribute  England's  sympathy  in  our  day,  with  the 
great  rebellion  of  the  South.  New  England  is  a  competitor  of  old 
England.  By  the  cheapness,  beauty,  and  durability  of  her  manu- 
factured fabrics,  she  has  come  to  be  a  dangerous  rival  of  the  old 
country.  Lowell  and  Lawrence,  are  beginning  to  stand  by  the  side 
of  Manchester  and  Stockport,  and  under  the  fostering  care  of  a 
judicious  protective  tariff,  may  perhaps  in  the  future  race  of  trade 
even  outrun  them.  Indeed,  as  an  intelligent  Englishman  visits  the 
eastern  and  northern  sections  of  this  country,  he  cannot,  we  think, 
fail  to  be  deeply  impressed  with  the,  to  him,  homelike  appearance 
of  everything  in  the  commercial  life  of  this  nation.  In  Pittsburg, 
begrimed  with  the  dust  and  smoke  of  scores  of  furnaces,  he  sees  his 
own  Birmingham  or  Glasgow;  Eastern  Massachusetts,  in  whose 
villages  and  cities  the  hum  of  the  spindle  and  the  loom  is  almost 
unbroken,  seems  to  him  like  a  second  Lancashire ;  and  so  vast  a 
forest  of  masts  as  lie  along,  and  stretch  out  from,  the  wharves  of 
New  York,  he  must  remember  scarce  ever  to  have  seen  on  the 
Thames,  or  the  Mersey.  But  extending  his  journey  to  the  cotton- 
growing  States  of  the  South,  how  different  is  the  aspect  of  every- 
thing that  he  beholds  !  The  picture  is  now  one  of  contrast,  not  of 
resemblance.  Nothing  here  in  trade  indicates  any  competition 
with  his  own  country,  but,  on  the  contrary,  everything  denotes 
supply  and  demand.  These  States  are,  commercially,  the  correl- 
ative of  England.  They  are  planting  States.  They  produce  just 
what  she  needs  to  keep  her  factories  in  motion,  and  then  aids  in 
the  consumption  of  her  finished  fabrics. 

In  her  present  sympathy,  then,  with  the  slaveholding  interests  of 
the  South,  England  has  only,  we  contend,  been  consistent  with  her- 
self. It  was  to  guard  her  own  manufactories  from  competition, 
that  she  forced  the  institution  of  slavery  upon  this  land.  For 
this  she  planted  this  Upas  in  our  country.  And  it  is  for  this  that 
she  would  protect  and  defend  it,  now  that  every  fiber  and  leaf  is 
quivering,  under  the  vigorous  blows  of  freedom. 

And  that  the  explanation  just  given  of  England's  pro-slavery 
policy,  toward  her  American  colonies  is  the  true  one,  the  history  of 
those  times  abundantly  proves.  A  British  merchant,  in  1745,  pub- 


20  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

lished  a  tract,  entitled  "  The  African  Slave  Trade  the  great  Pillar 
and  Support  of  the  British  Plantation  Trade  in  America,"  from 
which  Bancroft,  in  his  History,  makes  the  following  quotation  : — 

"  Were  it  possible  for  white  men  to  answer  the  end  of  negroes  in  plant- 
ing, the  colonies  would  interfere  with  the  manufactures  of  these  kingdoms. 
In  such  case,  indeed,  we  might  have  just  reason  to  dread  the  prosperity 
of  our  colonies,  but  while  we  can  supply  them  abundantly  with  negroes, 
we  need  be  under  no  such  apprehension.  Negro  labor  will  keep  our 
British  colonies  in  a  due  subserviency  to  the  interest  of  their  mother 
country ;  for  while  our  plantations  depend  on  planting  by  negroes,  our 
colonies  can  never  prove  injurious  to  British  manufactures,  never  become 
independent  of  these  kingdoms."* 

Nor  is  this  the  only  evidence  that  we  can  adduce  of  the  truthful- 
ness of  our  position.  One  of  the  first  articles  that  the  colonists 
attempted  to  manufacture  for  themselves  was  iron.  To  this  they 
were  invited  from  their  large  necessities  as  a  new  people,  and  from 
the  fact  that  the  country  especially  abounded  in  this  ore.  And  in 
time,  they  attained  so  much  proficiency  in  this  department  of  busi- 
ness, as  not  only  to  supply  their  own  wants,  but  to  export  small 
quantities  to  England.  But  this  fact  at  once  excited  alarm,  and 
the  subject  proposed  to  the  attention  of  the  House  of  Commons,  a 
committee  was,  in  1750,  appointed  "To  check  the  danger  of 
American  rivalry."  And  the  means,  proposed  by  that  committee, 
fell  little  short  of  positive  prohibition.  The  bill  introduced  by 
them,  and  subsequently  passed  by  the  Hoqse,  while  it  admitted 
American  iron  in  its  rudest  form  to  be  imported  free  of  duty,  "for- 
bade the  smiths  of  America  to  erect  any  mill  for  slitting  or  rolling 
iron,  or  any  plating  forge  to  work  with  a  tilt-hammer,  or  any  fur- 
nace for  making  steel."  And  at  the  very  same  time  that  these 
shackles  for  the  labor  of  free  men  were  forged,  and  England  put 
her  foot  upon  these  nascent  manufactories  in  her  colonies,  every 
restraint  was  taken  away  from  the  slave-trade,  the  whole  coast  of 
Africa,  from  Sallee  to  the  Cape  of  Good  Hope,  was  thrown  open 
to  all  the  subjects  of  the  king,  "  that  the  colonies  might  be  filled 
with  slaves,  who  would  neither  trouble  Britain  with  fears  of  en- 
couraging political  independence,  nor  compete  in  their  industry 
with  British  workshops"^ 

*  Bancroft,  vol.  iii.  p.  416. 
f  Ibid.,  vol.  iv.  p.  G2. 


SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR.  21 

But  we  must  hasten,  to  notice,  another  long  series  of  facts,  that 
are  of  the  highest  moment,  to  be  known  and  remembered,  by  all 
who  would  fully  understand  the  history  of  American  slavery. 
Closely  connected  in  time  with  the  purpose  of  our  national  inde- 
pendence, and  its  achievement,  was  the  inauguration  of  an  anti- 
slavery  policy. 

This  was  just  what  might  have  been  expected,  upon  the  suppo- 
sition, that  we  have  truthfully  portrayed  the  feelings  that  were  gen- 
erally prevalent  on  this  subject,  during  our  colonial  history.  The 
colonies  opposed  to  the  extension  of  slavery  in  their  midst,  and 
only  prevented  from  successfully  arresting  its  progress,  by  the  inter- 
position of  royal  authority;  the  conclusion  is  irresistible  that  with 
that  authority  denied,  and  successfully  resisted,  the  inception  of 
emancipation  would  immediately  follow.  And  so  it  was.  Between 
the  years  1777  and  1804,  eight  out  of  the  thirteen  colonies  pro- 
vided, by  special  legislative  enactments,  for  the  entire  extinction, 
throughout  their  whole  territory,  of  slavery.  And  that  the  re- 
mainder did  not  follow  so  goodly  an  example,  is  to  be  explained  by 
the  fact,  that  the  slave-trade  had  been  in  them  so  effectually  plied 
as,  in  a  measure,  to  subdue  that  opposition  to  slavery  which  had 
once  been  so  general.  We  say  "  in  a  measure"  subdued  it,  for 
even  in  some  of  these  colonies,  we  find  legislative  acts  proposed  or 
adopted,  that  were  directly  intended  to  arrest  the  progress  of 
slavery,  and  thus  prepare  the  way  for  its  final  abolition.  Especially 
was  this  true  of  the  Virginia  colony,  in  whose  soil  this  institution 
was,  as  we  have  seen,  first  planted.  In  October,  1778,  the  Gen- 
eral Assembly  of  Virginia  passed  an  act,  declaring  that  "  no  slave 
should  thereafter  be  brought  into  this  commonwealth  by  land  or 
by  water,  and  that  every  slave  imported  contrary  thereto,  should 
upon  such  importation  be  free."*  Here  both  the  domestic,  and 
foreign  slave-trade  were,  by  statute,  positively  prohibited.  Every 
channel  of  supply  was  cut  off.  The  new  Constitution,  also,  for 
Virginia,  prepared  and  proposed  by  Jefferson  a  few  years  subse- 
quent to  this,  contained  a  provision,  by  which  all  born  after  the 
year  1800  should  be  free.f  And  it  was  with  reference  to  this  pro- 
position that  Washington,  in  writing  to  his  nephew,  Lawrence 
Lewis,  in  August,  1797,  says  :  "I  wish  from  my  soul  that  the  leg- 
islature of  this  State  could  see  the  policy  of  a  gradual  abolition  of 

*  Tucker's  Blackstone,  vol.  ii.  p.  47,  Appendix, 
•j-  Stroud's  Laws  of  Slavery,  p.  6. 


22  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

slavery.  It  might  prevent  much  future  mischief.  "*  And,  though 
this  clause  of  the  constitution  was  finally  rejected,  yet  how  expres- 
sive of  the  true  anti-slavery  feeling  that  then  pervaded  Virginia  is 
the  fact,  asserted  by  Jefferson,  that  10,000  slaves  were  voluntarily 
emancipated  in  that  State  during  the  first  ten  years  of  our  exist- 
ence as  an  independent  people  !f 

Maryland,  also,  in  1*783  prohibited  the  further  importation  of 
slaves  into  her  territory,  and  removed  all  legal  restrictions  on 
emancipation  ;  and  three  years  later,  in  1186,  North  Carolina  de- 
clared the  introduction  of  slaves  into  that  State  "of  evil  conse- 
quence and  highly  impolitic,"  and  imposed  a  duty  of  five  pounds 
on  each  slave  thus  imported. | 

But  it  is  not  in  the  acts  of  the  separate  States,  or  colonies  only, 
that,  coeval  with  the  purpose  and  achievement  of  our  independ- 
ence, we  can  see  the  inception  of  an  anti-slavery  policy.  It  is 
readily  discovered  in  the  first  Congress  of  Delegates,  in  the  Con- 
vention that  framed  our  Constitution,  and  in  the  early  sessions  of 
our  Federal  Congress.  Among  the  first  measures  adopted  by  the 
Congress  of  Delegates,  which  commenced  its  sessions  in  Phila- 
delphia on  the  5th  of  September,  1774,  and  which  was,  let  it  be 
remembered,  the  first  representative  body  of  the  colonies,  was — as 
one  of  the  articles  of  the  non-importation  agreement — a  solemn 
pledge  to  abstain  from,  and  discountenance  the  slave-trade.  §  And, 
as  if  this  single  act  was  insufficient,  or  might  be  overlooked  in  the 
details  with  which  it  was  there  connected,  the  pledge  was  after- 
ward changed  into  a  positive  prohibition.  On  the  6th  of  April, 
1776,  it  was  resolved  that  no  slaves  be  imported  into  any  of  the 
thirteen  colonies.  ||  And  so,  again,  when  in  1787 — the  same  year 
in  which  the  Federal  Constitution  was  framed — Virginia  ceded  the 
territory  northwest  of  the  Ohio  River  to  the  "Confederation,"  the 
condition  of  its  acceptance  by  the  Continental  Congress  was,  that 
slavery  should  never  be  permitted  there.  And  the  insertion  of  this 
condition  in  the  ordinance,  not  only  secured  the  vote  of  all  the  South- 
ern States  then  represented  in  Congress,  but,  according  to  Mr. 
Benton,  it  was  " pre-eminently  the  work  of  the  South."  "The 


*  Irving's  Washington,  vol.  v.  p.  299. 

f  Twenty-First  Report  of  Pennsylvania  Anti-Slavery  Society,  p.  7. 

J  Political  Text  Book,  p.  50. 

\  Elliot's  Debates  on  the  Federal  Constitution,  vol.  i.  p.  44. 

||  Ibid.,  p.  54. 


SLAVERY   AND   THE    WAR.  23 

ordinance  for  the  government  of  the  territory  was  reported  by  a 
committee  of  five  members,  of  whom  three  were  from  slaveholding 
States,  and  two — and  one  of  them  the  chairman — were  from  Vir- 
ginia alone."*  Indeed,  that  the  great  conception  of  prohibiting 
slavery  in  that  territory  belongs  to  Jefferson,  there  can  be  no 
doubt,  f 

And  that  a  similar  policy,  was  designed  to  be  pursued,  by  the 
framers  of  our  Federal  Constitution,  we  are  constrained  to  believe. 
The  idea,  that  that  instrument  sjiould  ever  become  the  great  bul- 
wark of  slavery  in  this  land,  perpetuating  its  existence  where 
already  established,  and  promoting  its  extension  into  new  terri- 
tories, would  have  been  most  abhorrent,  to  a  large  majority  of 
those  who  assisted  in  its  construction.  In  their  earnest  desire,  to 
compact  into  one  united  and  harmonious  government,  States  so 
widely  separated  from  each  other  in  social  institutions,  and  geo- 
graphical boundaries;  they  did  indeed  give,  in  the  formation  of 
the  Constitution,  certain  advantages  to  slavery,  which  we  now  can- 
not but  deeply  regret ;  but  it  was  all  with  the  conviction,  that  the 
system  would  certainly  pass  away,  before  the  advancing  power  of 
civilization  and  freedom.  Moreover,  it  is  to  be  remembered  that 
when  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  was  formed,  slavery 
had  been  abolished  in  but  four,  of  the  thirteen  States,  that  were 
then  confederated. 

In  judging  of  the  true  spirit  of  any  assembly  of  men,  it  is  like- 
wise obvious,  that  we  must  look  not  simply  at  the  conclusions  to 
which  the  majority  reached,  but  also  at  the  whole  history  of  the 
discussions  which  may  have  preceded  these  conclusions,  and  at  the 
peculiar  circumstances  which  may  have  favored  them.  A  judg- 
ment formed,  entirely  apart  from  such  considerations,  may  clearly 
be  entirely  erroneous.  Let  us  apply  this  principle  to  the  case 
before  us. 

It  is  well  known  that  our  Constitution  contains  three  provisions 
with  reference  to  slavery,  though  the  word  itself  never  occurs  in 
the  whole  instrument.  It  provides,  that  three-fifths  of  those  who 
are  held  in  slavery,  shall  be  included  within  the  enumeration  of 
inhabitants,  by  which  the  ratio  of  representation  is  determined; 
(Article  I.  Section  2;)  it  forbade  the  prohibiting  by  Congress  of 
the  slave-trade  prior  to  the  year  1808,  (Article  I.  Section  9;)  and 

*  Thirty  Years  in  the  United  States  Senate,  vol.  i.  pp.  133,  134. 
f  Stroud's  Laws  of  Slavery,  p.  118. 


24  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

it  provides  for  the  rendition  of  persons  "  held  to  service  or  labor 
in  one  State,  under  the  laws  thereof,"  who  have  escaped  "into 
another,"  (Article  IV.  Section  2.) 

I.  With  regard  to  the  first  of  these  provisions,  we  concede  that 
it  was  a  lamentable  concession  to  slavery,  and  likewise  that  it  has 
been  the  cause  of  incalculable  injury  to  this  nation.  No  argument 
can  defend  it.  The  legislative  representation  of  slaves,  by  their 
masters,  is  a  monstrous  anomaly  in  a  republican  government. 
But,  conceding  all  this,  does  it  fallow  that,  in  the  introduction  of 
this  provision  into  the  Constitution,  its  framers  designed  to  make 
that  instrument  pro-slavery,  either  in  its  spirit  or  influence  ?  It 
is  to  be  remembered,  that  the  question  which  most  profoundly  agi- 
tated that  Convention,  was  the  apportionment  of  the  congressional 
representatives  among  the  several  States.  Some  contended  for  an 
equality  of  representation,  such  as  was  secured  to  them  by  the 
old  "Articles  of  Confederation;"  others  demanded  that  the  repre- 
sentation should  be  in  proportion  either  to  wealth  or  population. 
The  discussion  was  long  and  violent.  Threats  were  added  to 
arguments.  Some  of  the  smaller  States  talked  of  "  foreign  powers 
who  would  take  them  by  the  hand,"*  should  the  Convention  de- 
termine upon  an  inequality  of  suffrage.  Franklin,  almost  in  despair 
of  human  help,  moved  that  hereafter  the  Convention,  every  morn- 
ing, implore  the  Divine  blessing  upon  its  deliberations,  and  en- 
forced his  motion  by  this  weighty  inquiry:  "As  a  sparrow  does 
not  fall  without  Divine  permission,  can  we  suppose  that  govern- 
ments are  ever  erected  without  His  will  ?"f  Indeed,  during  the 
fortnight  that  was  spent  in  the  discussion  of  this  subject,  the 
Convention  was,  in  the  language  of  one  of  its  own  members,  "  on 
the  very  verge  of  dissolution."  It  was  "scarce  held  together  by 
the  strength  of  a  hair."$  And  finally  a  harmonious  conclusion 
was  reached  only  by  mutual  concessions.  The  larger  States  con- 
sented to  an  equal  representation  in  the  Senate;  the  smaller 
States  to  an  unequal  representation  in  the  House  of  Representa- 
tives. And,  as  in  the  case  of  the  large  slaveholding  States,  the 
white  population  was  small  in  comparison  with  that  which  the 
large  free  States  contained,  the  equality  of  representation  between 
the  two,  was  sought  to  be  promoted  by  adding,  in  the  former  in- 
stances, to  the  enumeration  of  the  free  inhabitants,  three-fifths  of 

*  Elliot's  Debates  on  the  Federal  Constitution,  vol.  i.  p.  473. 
f  Ibid.,  p*.  460.  J  Ibid.,  p.  358. 


SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR.  25 

all  other  persons.  Thus,  it  was  entirely  as  a  compromise,  and 
one,  too,  deemed  at  the  time  essential  to  the  formation  of  any 
federative  system,  that  this  provision  was  introduced  into  our  Con- 
stitution. 

But  though  such  was  its  character,  let  no  one  imagine  that  it 
was  permitted  to  pass,  in  silence,  that  body.  The  very  men  who 
finally  voted  for  it,  as  a  concession  necessary  or  expedient  to  be 
made,  still  declared,  in  the  most  stirring  words,  their  faith  in  its 
unrighteousness.  An  address  delivered  before  the  legislature  of 
Maryland,  by  Luther  Martin,  Esq.,  Attorney-General  of  the  State, 
and  one  of  its  delegates  to  the  Convention  that  framed  the  Federal 
Constitution,  contains  this  remarkable  paragraph  : — 

"  With  respect  to  that  part  of  the  second  section  of  the  first  article, 
which  relates  to  the  apportionment  of  representation  and  direct  tax- 
ation, there  were  considerable  objections  made  to  it,  besides  the  great 
objection  of  inequality.  It  was  urged,  that  no  principle  could  justify 
taking  slaves  into  computation  in  apportioning  the  number  of  represent- 
atives a  State  should  have  in  the  Government ;  that  it  involved  the  ab- 
surdity of  increasing  the  power  of  a  State  in  making  laws  for  free  men 
in  proportion  as  that  State  violated  the  rights  of  freedom  ;  that  it  might 
be  proper  to  take  slaves  into  consideration  when  taxes  were  to  be  appor- 
tioned, because  it  had  a  tendency  to  discourage  slavery ;  but  to  take 
them  into  account  in  giving  representation,  tended  to  continue  that 
infamous  traffic  ;  that  slaves  could  not  be  taken  into  account  as  men,  or 
citizens,  because  they  were  not  admitted  to  the  rights  of  citizens  in  the 
States  which  adopted  or  continued  slavery.  If  they  were  to  be  taken 
into  account  as  property,  it  was  asked  what  peculiar  circumstance  should 
render  this  property  (of  all  others  the  most  odious  in  its  nature)  entitled 
to  the  high  privilege  of  conferring  consequence  and  power  in  the  Gov- 
ernment to  its  possessors,  rather  than  any  other  property?  and  why 
slaves  should,  as  property,  be  taken  into  account  rather  than  horses, 
cattle,  mules,  or  any  other  species  ?  And  it  was  observed,  by  an  honorable 
member  from  Massachusetts,  that  he  considered  it  as  dishonorable  and 
humiliating  to  enter  into  compact  with  the  slaves  of  the  Southern  States, 
as  it  would  with  the  horses  and  mules  of  the  Eastern."* 


*  Elliot's  Debates  on  the  Federal  Constitution,  vol.  i.  p.  363. 

It  may  be  worthy  of  remark,  in  this  connection,  as  illustrating  the  general 
truth  of  our  position,  that,  although  the  "member  from  Massachusetts" 
opposed  so  strenuously  by  his  speech  this  provision  of  the  Constitution,  yet 
by  his  vote  he  supported  it.  The  principle  was  first  introduced  by  a  reso- 
lution moved  by  James  Wilson,  of  Pennsylvania,  June  11,  1787.  Massa- 
chusetts voted  in  the  affirmative.  (Ibid.,  vol.  i.  169.)  . 


26  SLAVERY   AND    THE    WAR. 

II.  With  regard  to  the  constitutional  provision  that  "  the  mi- 
gration or  importation  of  such  persons  as  any  of  the  States  now 
existing  shall  think  proper  to  admit,  shall  not  be  prohibited  by 
Congress  prior  to  1808" — the  second  reference,  as  we  have  seen, 
that  that  instrument  makes  to  slavery — there  are  several  things 
that  should  be  said,  (a)  It  did  not  preclude,  but  implied,  the 
right  of  the  States  severally  to  prohibit  the  importation  of  slaves 
in  their  own  domain.  (6)  It  did  not  prevent  Congress  at  any 
time  from  excluding  the  traffic  from  the  territories,  (c)  It  was 
a  virtual  concession  of  the  iniquity  of  the  trade ;  it  set  the  seal 
of  the  country's  reprobation  upon  it.  (d)  In  a  measure  it  fore- 
shadowed its  coming  end.  To  say  that  prior  to  1808  Congress 
shall  not  prohibit  in  any  State  the  slave-trade,  is  almost  tanta- 
mount to  saying  that  after  that  it  may,  and,  in  all  probability,  will. 
It  was  a  sure  prophecy  of  its  destruction. 

Moreover,  from  the  history  of  the  Convention  we  learn  that  the 
introduction  of  this  provision  into  the  Constitution,  was  the  result 
of  a  compromise  between  the  clashing  interests  of  commerce  and 
slavery.  When  the  first  draft  of  the  Constitution  was  reported, 
(August  6,  1787,)  it  contained  one  section,  (Article  VII.  Section 
4,)  which  entirely  forbade  Congress  at  any  time  from  prohibiting 
the  slave-trade,  and  another,  which  provided  (Article  VII.  Section 
6)  that  "No  navigation  act  should  be  passed  without  the  assent  of 
two-thirds  of  the  members  present  in  each  house."*  The  former 
of  these  sections  the  South  were  solicitous  to  retain ;  the  latter 
the  North  were  as  anxious  to  reject.  The  one  fostered  slavery, 
the  other  would  cripple  commerce.  The  result  that  was  finally 
reached  through  a  committee  appointed  "  to  reconcile  these  con- 
flicting interests,"  was  the  entire  omission  of  the  section  restricting 
navigation  acts,  and  the  amendment  of  that  which  related  to  the 
importation  of  slaves,  so  as  to  limit,  to  a  certain  specified  time, 
its  prohibition  by  Congress,  f  A  member  of  that  committee  thus 
speaks  of  its  deliberations :  "  I  found  the  Eastern  States,  not- 
withstanding their  aversion  to  slaves,  very  willing  to  indulge  the 
Southern  States,  at  least  with  a  temporary  liberty  to  prosecute 
the  slave-trade ;  provided  the  Southern  States  would,  in  their  turn, 
gratify  them  by  laying  no  restriction  on  navigation  acts  ;  and 
after  a  very  little  while  the  committee,  by  a  great  majority,  agreed 
to  such  a  report."J 


*  Elliot's  Debates  on  the  Federal  Constitution,  vol.  i.  p.  227. 
t  Ibid.,  p.  261.  J  Ibid.,  p.  373. 


•    SLAVERY   AND   THE    WAR.  27 

But  it  was  not  without  considerable  opposition  that  this  report 
received  the  sanction  of  the  Convention.  Indeed,  there  is  hardly 
anything  in  the  whole  history  of  that  body  more  worthy  of  remark 
than  the  bold  attacks  upon  slavery  which  were  made  in  connection 
with  that  discussion.  "  In  a  government  formed  pretendedly  on 
the  principles  of  liberty,  and  for  its  preservation,  to  have  a  pro- 
vision, not  only  putting  it  out  of  its  power  at  once  to  restrain  and 
prevent  the  slave  trade,  but  even  encouraging  that  infamous  traffic, 
ought,"  it  was  contended,  "  to  be  considered  as  a  solemn  mockery 
of,  and  insult  to  that  God  whose  protection  we  had  implored  ;  and 
could  not  fail  to  hold  us  up  in  detestation,  and  render  us  contempt- 
ible to  every  true  friend  of  liberty  in  the  world."  *  *  "Slavery" 
was  alleged  to  be  "  inconsistent  with  the  genius  of  republicanism, 
and  has  a  tendency  to  destroy  those  principles  on  which  it  is  sup- 
ported." *  *  It  was  likewise  urged  that  "national  crimes  can 
only  be,  and  frequently  are,  punished  in  this  world  by  national 
judgments,  and  that  the  continuance  of  the  slave-ti'ade^  and  thus 
giving  it  a  national  sanction  and  encouragement,  ought  to  be  con- 
sidered as  justly  exposing  us  to  the  displeasure  and  vengeance  of 
Him  who  is  equally  Lorti  of  all,  and  who  views  with  equal  eye  the 
poor  African  slave  and  his  American  master."*  Nor  was  this 
opposition  confined  to  the  non-slaveholding  States.  The  vote  of 
Virginia  was  uniformly  against  this  provision  of  the  Constitution  ;f 
and  the  fact  of  its  existence  in  that  instrument  was  employed  as  an 
argument  for  its  rejection  before  the  Legislature  of  Maryland. 
"You  will  perceive,  Sir,"  said  Luther  Martin,  in  the  address 
already  referred  to,  "not  only  that  the  general  government  is  pro- 
hibited from  interfering  in  the  slave-trade  before  the  year  1808, 
but  that  there  is  no  provision  in  the  Constitution  that  it  shall 
afterwards  be  prohibited,  nor  any  security  that  such  prohibition  will 
ever  take  place  !  and  I  think  there  is  great  reason  to  believe  that,  if 
the  importation  of  slaves  is  permitted  until  the  year  1808,  it  will  not 
be  prohibited  afterwards.  At  this  time  we  do  not  generally  hold 
this  commerce  in  so  great  abhorrence  as  we  have  done.  When 
our  liberties  were  at  stake,  we  warmly  felt  for  the  common  rights 
of  men.  The  danger  being  thought  to  be  past  which  threatened 
ourselves,  we  are  daily  growing  more  insensible  to  those  rights. "J 

*  Elliot's  Debates  on  the  Federal  Constitution,  vol.  i.  pp.  373,  374. 

f  Ibid.,  vol.  i.  p.  265. 

J  Ibid.,  vol.  i.  pp.  374,  375. 


28  SLAVERY    AND    THE    WAR. 

III.  Of  that  provision  of  the  Constitution  which  relates  to  the 
rendition  of  fugitive  slaves,  the  question  has  been  much  agitated, 
whether  its  intent  was  to  clothe  Congress  with  the  power  of  legis- 
lating in  respect  to  the  surrender  of  such  persons,  or  whether  it  was 
intended  to  leave  it  to  the  several  States  to  provide  a  mode  for  the 
investigation  of  such  claims,  and,  if  found  for  the  claimants,  to  de- 
liver up  to  them  the  fugitives.  That  regarding  alone  the  letter  of 
the  provision,  it  is,  at  least,  susceptible  of  this  latter  interpretation, 
few,  we  suppose,  would  deny.  It  was  thus  that  Daniel  Webster, 
the  greatest  Constitutional  lawyer  of  his  age,  if  not  of  our  country, 
understood  it,  and  the  fact  that  it  was  adopted  by  the  unanimous 
vote  of  the  Convention  certainly  favors  such  interpretation.  Al- 
though, then,  the  Supreme  Court  of  the  United  States  has  set  this 
question,  legally,  at  rest,  by  deciding  that  the  power  of  legislating 
with  respect  to  fugitive  slaves  belongs  exclusively  to  the  Federal 
government;*  and  though  that  government  has,  in  accordance 
with  this'decision,  frequently  legislated  upon  the  subject,  yet  for 
no  one  of  these  acts,  whatever  may  be  their  character,  can  the  Con- 
stitution be  certainly  held  responsible.  No  one  can  positively 
affirm  that  the  framers  of  that  instrument 'ever  designed  to  confer 
such  authority.  All  for  which  it  can  properly  be  held  responsible 
is  the  simple  fact  of  the  return  to  bondage  of  those  who  may  have 
escaped  from  it.  And  if  free  and  slave  States  are  in  any  way  to 
confederate,  is  not  such  a  provision  essential  ?  Where  the  territory 
of  freedom  is  continuous  to  that  of  slavery,  can  the  line  of  demar- 
kation  be  preserved  distinct,  save  by  some  arrangement  that  will 
prevent  liberty  from  being  secured  by  its  simple  passage  ?  The 
injustice  of  the  rendition  of  fugitive  slaves  in  States  confederated 
under  one  government,  lies  not  in  the  fact  of  the  rendition,  for 
which  the  Constitution  alone  provides,  but  in  the  mode  by  which 
that  end  is  secured,  by  special  legislative  enactments. 

And  a  similar  anti-slavery  policy  can  easily  be  traced  through 
the  first  sessions  of  our  Federal  Congress.  Men  utterly  ignore  the 
early  history  of  our  national  government,  who  suppose  that  its 
power  was  employed  in  conserving,  and  upholding  slavery.  The 
very  reverse  was  true.  Many  solemn  acts  of  legislation,  sanctioned 
by  every  branch  of  our  national  administration,  were  passed,  with 
the  avowed  purpose  of  restricting,  limiting,  and  ultimately  de- 
stroying this  institution.  The  fathers  of  our  republic  were  per- 

*  16  Peters,  pp.  539,  622. 


SLAVERY    AND    THE    WAR.  29 

sistent  in  their  efforts  to  curtail,  and  finally  to  destroy  the  slave- 
trade.  They  sought  entirely  to  dry  up  the  fountain  of  this  evil,  to 
cut  off  the  source  of  its  supply,  and  thus,  in  time,  to  secure  liberty 
to  the  whole  land.  Let  us  verify  this  assertion  by  a  brief  record 
of  facts. 

Two  years  after  the  adoption  of  our  Federal  Constitution  by 
Conventions  of  the  several  States,  Congress  prohibited  the  for- 
eign slave-trade.  On  the  22d  of  March,  1194,  an  act  was  passed, 
declaring  that  "  no  citizen  or  resident  of  the  country  should  build, 
equip,  or  send  out  any  ship  or  vessel  to  any  foreign  country  to  pro- 
cure the  inhabitants  thereof,  or  to  transport  them  to  any  foreign 
place  or  port  to  be  sold  or  disposed  of  as  slaves."  And  the  pen- 
alty annexed  to  this  statute  was  the  confiscation  of  the  vessel,  and 
a  fine  of  $200  for  each  person  so  taken  or  sold.  And  here,  it  is 
well  to  remark,  that  this  act  was  passed  thirteen  years  before  a 
similar  policy  was  established  by  the  English  government.  In- 
stead, therefore,  of  being  constrained  by  the  sentiment  of  other 
nations  to  assume  this  position,  it  was  in  advance  of  that  senti- 
ment, and  tended  to  create  it.  We  were  not  here  the  slow  imita- 
tors of  others,  but  rather  the  noble  exemplar,  that  they  have  tardily 
followed. 

And,  that  this  act  might  be  still  more  effectual  in  the  destruction 
of  the  foreign  slave-trade,  it  was,  on  the  10th  of  May,  1800,  supple- 
mented by  another,  which  declared  "  that  no  citizen  or  resident  of  the 
United  States  should  own,  or  have  any  right  of  property  in  any 
ship  or  vessel  engaged  in  the  slave-trade  anywhere  upon  the  sea, 
no  matter  from  what  place  or  port  it  might  sail."  This  act  was  also 
enforced  by  new  and  more  severe  penalties.  "  It  prohibited  any  sailor 
from  serving  on  board  of  a  slaver,  and  authorized  our  commissioned 
vessels  to  seize  any  ship  engaged  in  this  trade,  and  bring  her  into 
port  for  condemnation." 

Nor  was  it  the  foreign  slave-trade  alone  that  our  national  Con- 
gress in  its  earlier  sessions  sought  to  destroy.  Unable,  as  we  have 
seen,  prior  to  1808,  by  a  special  provision  of  the  Constitution,  to 
prohibit  "  the  migration  or  importation  of  such  persons  as  any  of 
the  States  now  existing  shall  think  proper  to  admit,"  it  yet  had  the 
right  of  such  a  prohibition  with  reference  to  the  Territories,  and 
did  not  scruple,  in  some  instances,  to  exercise  it.  On  the  7th  of 
April,  1798,  an  act  was  passed  by  Congress,  authorizing  the  estab- 
lishment of  a  government  in  the  Mississippi  Territory,  the  7th  sec- 
tion of  which  provides  "  That  after  the  establishment  of  the  afore- 


30  SLAVERY   AND    THE    WAR. 

said  government  it  shall  not  be  lawful  for  any  person  or  persons  to 
import  or  bring  into  the  said  Mississippi  Territory,  from  any  port 
or  place  without  the  limits  of  the  United  States,  or  to  cause  to  be 
imported  *  *  any  slave  or  slaves,  and  that  every  person  so 
offending  *  *  shall  forfeit  *  *  for  each  slave  so  imported 
*  *  the  sum  of  $300  *  *  and  that  every  slave  so  imported 
shall  thereupon  become  entitled  to,  and  receive  his  or  her  free- 
dom."* And  the  provision  of  a  similar  nature,  incorporated  into 
the  Act  of  Congress,  passed  March  26th,  1804,  entitled  "An  Act 
erecting  Louisiana  into  two  territories,  and  providing  for  the  tem- 
porary government  thereof,"  is  still  more  hostile  to  slavery.  It 
prohibits  the  introduction  into  Louisiana  Territory  "from  any 
port  or  place  within,"  as  well  as  without  "the  limits  of  the  United 
States  *  *  any  slave  or  slaves  which  had  been  imported  since 
the  first  of  May,  1798,  into  any  port  or  place  within  the  limits  of 
the  United  States,  or  which  should  be  imported  thereafter."  And 
contains,  in  addition,  this  provision,  "And  no  slave  or  slaves  shall 
directly  or  indirectly  be  introduced  into  said  territory,  except  by  a 
citizen  of  the  United  States  removing  into  said  territory  for  actual 
settlement,  and  being  at  the  time  of  such  removal  bona  fide  owner 
of  such  slave  or  slaves ;  and  every  slave  imported  or  brought  into 
the  said  territory,  contrary  to  the  provisions  of  this  act,  shall 
thereupon  be  entitled  to  and  receive  his  freedom. "f 

But  these  attempts  to  destroy  the  slave  trade  abroad,  and  to 
curtail  it  at  home,  were  only  preliminary  to  its  entire  prohibition  ; 
and  it  is  an  interesting  fact  that  that  was  decreed  at  the  very  ear- 
liest day  on  which  Congress  had  the  power.  On  the  second  of 
March,  1807,  it  was  enacted  "  that  from  and  after  January  1, 1808, 
it  shall  not  be  lawful  to  import  or  bring  into  the  United  States,  or 
the  territories  thereof,  from  any  foreign  kingdom,  place,  or  country, 
any  negro,  mulatto,  or  person  of  color  as  a  slave,  or  to  be  held  to 
service  and  labor."  The  penalty  incurred  for  a  violation  of  this 
statute  was  the  confiscation  of  the  vessel,  and  a  fine  of  $20,000  each 
against  the  parties  engaged,  their  aiders  and  abettors.  To  enforce 
it,  the  President  was  also  empowered  to  employ  the  naval  forces  of 
the  nation. 

By  a  subsequent  act  this1  penalty  was  increased.  Imprisonment 
was  added  to  fines,  and  the  forfeiture  of  property.  On  the  20th  of 

*  Acts  of  (he  2d  Session  of  the  Fifth  Congress,  ch.  45. 
f  2  Story's  Laws,  p.  937. 


SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR.  31 

April,  1818,  Congress  passed  a  statute  providing  that  all  persons 
convicted  of  being  in  any  way  engaged  in  the  slave-trade  should 
"be  imprisoned  for  a  terra  not  exceeding  seven  years,  nor  less  than 
three  years."  And  finally,  as  a  fitting  conclusion  to  this  policy,  so 
persistently  pursued  through  a  long  course  of  years,  Congress,  on 
the  15th  of  May,  1820,  declared  the  slave-trade,  and  the  act  of  de- 
taining negroes  or  mulattoes,  with  intent  to  make  them  slaves,  to 
be  piracy,  and  provided  that  any  person  whatever  who  should 
engage  in  the  trade,  or  assist  in  detaining  such  persons,  with  the 
intent  to  make  them  slaves,  should  be  adjudged  a  pirate,  and  as 
such  shall  suffer  death. 

But  this  brings  us  to  the  last  point  in  the  history  of  American 
Slavery  that  we  propose  in  this  article  to  notice.  Its  defenders 
are  entirely  of  modern  times.  The  idea  that  the  involuntary 
servitude  of  reasonable  beings,  except  as  a  punishment  for  crime, 
was  indefensibly  wrong,  was,  until  a  little  more  than  a  quarter  of 
a  century  ago,  almost  universal;  and  in  respect  to  the  existence 
of  such  a  servitude  here,  it  was,  until  the  time  just  mentioned, 
everywhere  spoken  of  as  a  great  moral  and  political  evil. 

In  confirmation  of  this  position,  it  is  pertinent  to  refer  to  the 
whole  series  of  facts  just  detailed ;  for  surely  men  who,  by  legis- 
lative enactments  continued  for  a  long  course  of  years,  sought  to 
limit,  curtail,  and  ultimately  destroy  the  institution  of  slavery, 
could  not  have  regarded  it,  as  either  morally  right  or  politically 
expedient.  We  are  not  wont  to  dry  up  a  fountain,  when  we  be- 
lieve that  the  streams  which  issue  from  it,  flow  out  in  blessings  to 
the  world;  nor  do  we  lay  the  axe  at  the  root  of  a  tree  whose  fruit 
we  know  to  be  pleasant  and  healthful.  If  men  believed  that  the 
introduction  of  a  single  slave  into  this  land  was  a  crime  against 
humanity,  worthy  of  death,  and  if  they  were  ready  to  embody  that 
faith  in  a  positive  statute,  how  could  they  regard  as  innocent  his 
continuance  in  bondage,  and  the  entail  of  servitude  upon  his  latest 
posterity?  The  importation  into  this  country  of  Africans,  as 
slaves,  a  wrong,  so  deep  that  blood  alone  could  atone  for  it,  the 
wrong  of  holding  them  hopelessly  and  forever  in  that  relation  is, 
from  the  premise,  we  contend,  a  logical  conclusion.  True,  a  wise 
expediency  and  a  due  regard  to  Christ's  great  law  of  love,  may 
not  demand  their  immediate  enfranchisement.  Strangers  in  a 
strange  land,  and  savages  in  the  midst  of  civilization,  such  a 
course  might  only  deepen  the  wrong  that  they  have  already  suf- 


32  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

fered.  With  the  intent  of  preparing  them  for  freedom,  its  enjoy- 
ment might  rightfully  be  temporarily  denied  them. 

Precisely  this  was  the  view  of  American  slavery  that,  until  quite 
recently,  was  universally  cherished  in  this  land.  Those  honored  men 
of  our  nation  who  stood  up,  as  we  have  seen,  so  boldly  in  their  oppo- 
sition to  the  slave-trade,  who  branded  it  as  inhuman  and  infamous, 
who  first  fined,  and  then  imprisoned,  and  then  pronounced  as  worthy 
of  death,  all  who  were  in  any  way  engaged  in  it,  were  not  so  illog- 
ical as  to  fail  to  see  the  true  scope  and  bearing  of  their  acts.  No ! 
They  saw  it,  and  meant  that  the  world  should  see  it.  Their  severe 
condemnation  of  the  slave-trade,  and  their  persistent  efforts  to  de- 
stroy it,  was  the  purposed  avowal  of  their  faith,  that  every  system 
of  involuntary  servitude  that  was  not  designed  to  ultimate  in  uni- 
versal freedom,  and  that  was  not  conducted  so  as  certainly  to  secure 
this  end,  was  indefensibly  wrong. 

But  it  is  not  upon  any  inference  alone,  however  logical,  that  we 
rest  our  position.  The  frequent  introduction  of  slavery,  as  a  topic 
of  earnest  discussion,  in  our  National  Congress,  was  one  of  the 
unavoidable  results  of  its  existence.  The  feature  of  society  that 
distinguished  one  portion  of  our  Union  from  the  other,  and  that 
caused  the  interests  of  one  section  to  conflict  with  those  of  the 
other,  there  was  in  fact  scarcely  a  single  question  of  national  policy, 
that  was  not  in  some  measure  complicated  with  it,  and  that  conse- 
quently did  not  involve  its  consideration.  And  surely  if,  in  any 
place,  and  under  any  circumstances,  slavery  would  find  valiant 
defenders,  here  is  the  place  and  the  occasion.  Men,  we  know,  in 
the  heat  of  debate  and  under  the  irritation  of  opposing  sentiments, 
often  go  much  further  in  the  statement  of  their  own,  than  their 
cooler  judgment  would  allow.  In  reading,  then,  the  discussions 
of  slavery  that  were  had  in  the  early  sessions  of  our  National  Con- 
gress, how  natural  the  expectation  that  we  would  find  there,  if 
anywhere,  this  institution,  in  its  righteousness  and  humanity, 
stoutly  defended.  But  it  is  not  so.  Southern  statesmen,  in  those 
days,  were  indeed  often  earnest  in  the  maintenance  of  those  rights 
which  they  supposed  the  Constitution  secured  to  their  peculiar 
institution,  but  seldom  if  ever,  did  they  boldly  avow  it  to  be  in 
itself  just  and  humane.  Their  more  general  policy  was  frankly  to 
acknowledge  slavery  as  an  evil,  for  the  present  to  be  borne  pa- 
tiently and  kindly,  but  in  the  future  to  be,  in  some  way  unseen  by 
them,  forever  abolished. 

From  the  many  illustrations  of  this  truth  which  might  be  given 


SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR.  33 

we  will  select  two,  not  because  they  are  any  more  striking  than 
many  others,  but  because  they  are  in  time  the  nearest  that  we  can 
discover  to  that  most  lamentable  change  of  sentiment  which  on 
this  subject  has  recently  taken  place. 

One  of  the  most  earnest,  protracted,  and  exciting  debates  that 
ever  took  place  in  our  National  Congress,  was  in  connection  with 
the  admission  of  Missouri  as  a  State  into  the  Federal  Union. 
Commencing  as  early  as  April,  1818,  it  was  continued  until  the 
commencement  of  1821,  and  was  oftentimes  conducted  with  so 
much  acrimony  and  sectional  jealousy,  as  to  threaten  the  very  sta- 
bility of  the  government.  Jefferson,  the  sun  of  whose  life  was  then 
near  its  setting,  was  greatly  alarmed,  and  frequently  expressed  his 
fear  that  that  union  of  States,  which  he  had  done  so  much  to  form, 
was  on  the  eve  of  dissolution.  And,  indeed,  had  it  not  been  for 
what  is  usually  called  the  "Missouri  Compromise,"  we  can  hardly 
see  how  such  a  catastrophe  could  have  been  avoided.  By  that  act 
mutual  concessions  were  made ;  nor  is  it  easy  to  see  which  party 
was  really  the  gainer.  Missouri,  admitted  as  a  slaveholding  State 
into  the  Union,  slavery  was,  on  the  other  hand,  forever  prohibited 
from  an  extent  of  territory  larger  than  the  area  of  all  the  Atlantic 
Slave  States  put  together.  Moreover,  it  is  to  be  remembered  that, 
contemporaneous  with  this  act,  was  the  admission  of  Maine  as  a 
free  State,  and  also  that  treaty  which,  in  acquiring  Florida,  ceded 
Texas,  the  largest  possession  of  the  United  States  south  of  the 
proposed  line,  to  Spain.  Mr.  Benton  is  doubtless  mistaken  in 
asserting  that  this  "compromise"  was  "-all  clear  gain  to  the  anti- 
slavery  side  of  the  question;"*  or,  again,  that  "it  yielded  forever 
to  the  free  States  the  absolute  predominance  in  the  Union. "f  But 
no  less  in  error  we  think,  are  those  who,  on  the  other  side,  regard 
it  as  a  signal  triumph  of  slavery  over  freedom.  It  was  emphat- 
ically a  "compromise." 

But  what  in  this  protracted  and  earnest  discussion  most  con- 
cerns us  here  to  notice,  is  the  almost  entire  absence  of  any  defense 
of  slavery,  either  upon  moral  or  political  grounds.  The  men  who 
so  persistently  demanded  that  no  restrictions  should  be  put  upon 
slavery  in  Missouri,  founded  their  argument  almost  entirely  upon 
those  rights  which  the  Constitution  secured  to  the  separate  States. 


*  Benton's  Thirty  Years  in  the  U.  S.  Senate,  vol.  i.  p.  6. 
f  Ibid.,  vol.  ii.  p.  140. 

3 


34  SLAVERY    AND   THE   WAR. 

They  did  not  contend  that  slavery  should  be  extended  because  it 
was  a  good  institution,  approved  of  God,  and  fraught  with  bless- 
ings to  society.  The  very  reverse  was  true.  They  acknowledged 
it  as  an  evil,  apologized  for  its  existence  in  their  midst,  condemned 
the  whole  system  as  essentially  unrighteous,  and  expressed  their 
confident  hope  that  the  institution  would  in  time  be  entirely  re- 
moved from  our  land.  How  remarkable  this  fact !  That  no  one 
may  be  skeptical  as  to  its  truthfulness,  let  us  quote  a  few  sentences 
from  several  of  the  memorable  speeches  that  were  then  made. 
"Sir!  I  envy,"  said  John  Randolph,  "neither  the  head  nor  the 
heart  of  any  man  from  the  North  who  rises  here  to  defend  slavery." 
"Slavery  was  an  evil,"  said  Senator  Elliott,  of  Georgia,  found  in 
this  country  at  the  formation  of  the  present  government,  and  it 
was  tolerated,  only  because  it  could  not  be  remedied."*  "Gen- 
tlemen tell  us,"  said  Mr.  Lowrie,  of  Pennsylvania,  "that  slavery  is 
an  evil,  and  that  they  lament  its  existence,  and  yet,  strange  as  it 
may  seem,  they  contend  for  the  extension  of  this  evil  to  the  peace- 
ful regions  west  of  the  Mississippi,  "f  "Many  of  those  who  have 
opposed  this  amendment,"  said  John  Sergeant,  of  Pennsylvania — 
that  is,  the  amendment  prohibiting  slavery  from  Missouri — "have 
agreed  with  us  in  characterizing  slavery  as  an  evil  and  a  curse,  in 
language  stronger  than  we  should  perhaps  be  at  liberty  to  use."| 
A  writer  in  Niles'  Register  for  March  1 1, 1820,  reviewing  the  whole 
debate  on  this  subject,  says :  "  Few,  if  any,  are  bold  enough  to  advo- 
cate the  practice  of  slavery  as  being  right  in  itself,  or  dare  to  justify 
it,  except  on  the  plea  of  necessity."  Indeed,  Mr.  Clay,  in  his  cele- 
brated speech  near  the  close  of  this  discussion,  ventured  to  rebuke 
his  Southern  brethren  for  conceding  so  frankly  the  unrighteousness 
of  slavery,  characterizing  it  as  an  "unnecessary  concession."  Nor 
should  we  here  fail  to  mention,  as  illustrating  still  further  how 
almost  universally  prevalent  anti-slavery  sentiments  then  were,  the 
fact,  that  in  connection  with  this  great  debate,  the  legislatures  of 
New  York,  Pennsylvania,  and  New  Jersey,  all  unanimously  passed 
resolutions,  not  only  objecting  to  the  admission  of  Missouri  as  a 
slaveholding  State  into  the  Union,  but  objecting  hereafter  to  the 
admission  of  any  territory  as  a  State,  without  making  the  prohi- 
bition of  slavery  an  indispensable  condition  of  its  admission.  § 


*  Niles'  Register,  vol.  xvii.  p.  408.  f  Ibid.,  vol.  xvii.  p.  415. 

J  Ibid.,  vol.  xviii.  p.  382.  \  Political  Text-Book,  p.  60. 


SLAVERY  AND   THE   WAR.  35 

The  other  Congressional  debate  that  I  have  selected  as  illus- 
trating this  truth,  occurred  in  the  Senate  about  nine  years  after 
the  one  we  have  just  noticed,  and  has  been  made  especially  memo- 
rable by  the  well-known  reply  of  Webster  to  Hayne.  The  discus- 
sion did  not  in  itself  involve  the  subject  of  slavery.  It  arose  upon 
a  motion  to  limit  the  sales  of  the  public  lands ;  but  as  this  natu- 
rally led  to  some  comparison  between  the  growth  of  free  and  slave 
territory,  a  debate  upon  the  whole  subject  soon  followed ;  and,  for 
many  reasons,  the  discussion  was  one  peculiarly  irritating  to  the 
South.  It  came  upon  them  unexpectedly ;  was  not  really  germain  to 
the  subject ;  seemed  to  be  introduced  for  the  very  purpose  of  provok- 
ing reply  and  stirring  up  anger;  and  contained  many  incontrovertible 
facts,  that  were  most  damaging  to  slavery.  Thus,  comparing  Ken- 
tucky and  Ohio,  Mr.  Webster  attributed  the  superior  improvement 
and  population  of  the  latter,  to  its  exemption  from  the  evils  of 
slavery,  and  with  this  as  an  example,  generalized,  to  what  must 
always  be  the  effect  in  any  State,  of  its  permission  or  prohibition. 
In  reply,  the  principal  speakers  were  Mr.  Hayne,  of  South  Caro- 
lina, and  Mr.  Benton,  of  Missouri,  and  though  they  both  resented, 
with  warmth,  as  a  reflection  upon  the  Slave  States,  this  disadvan- 
tageous comparison,  they  still  essayed  no  defense  of  slavery,  but, 
on  the  contrary,  fully  and  freely  admitted  it  to  be  a  great  evil. 
The  spirit  of  their  speeches  was,  in  this  regard,  precisely  like 
that  which  characterized — as  we  have  already  seen — the  debate 
on  the  Missouri  controversy.  We  extract  a  few  sentences  from 
one  of  the  speeches  of  Mr.  Benton,  which  will  not  only  confirm 
our  present  position,  but  throw  light  upon  others  that  we  have 
previously  in  this  article  considered.  Addressing  himself  to  the 
North,  and  declaring  his  purpose  "to  disabuse  them  of  some  erro- 
neous impressions,"  Mr.  Benton  remarks: — 

"  To  them  I  can  truly  say  that  slavery,  in  the  abstract,  has  but  few 
advocates  or  defenders  in  the  slaveholding  States,  and  that  slavery  as 
it  is,  an  hereditary  institution  descended  upon  us  from  our  ancestors, 
would  have  fewer  advocates  among  us  than  it  has,  if  those  who  have 
nothing  to  do  with  the  subject  would  only  let  us  alone.  *  *  The  views 
of  leading  men  in  the  North  and  the  South  were  indisputably  the  same 
in  the  earlier  periods  of  our  government.  Of  this  our  legislative  history 
contains  the  highest  proof.  The  foreign  slave-trade  was  prohibited  in 
Virginia  as  soon  as  the  Revolution  began.  It  was  one  of  her  first  acts 
of  sovereignty.  In  the  convention  of  that  State  which  adopted  the  Fed- 
eral Constitution,  it  was  an  objection  to  that  instrument  that  it  tolerated 
the  African  slave-trade  for  twenty  years.  Nothing  that  has  appeared 


36  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

since  has  surpassed  the  indignant  denunciations  of  this  traffic  by  Patrick 
Henry,  GTeorge  Mason,  and  others  in  that  convention."* 

But  from  this  view  of  what,  until  quite  recently,  was  the  anti- 
slavery  sentiment  of  this  country,  as  evinced  by  the  spirit  of  our 
Congressional  debates,  let  us  now  for  one  moment  turn  to  observe 
the  same  fact  as  illustrated  by  the  deliverances  of  different  religious 
bodies. 

Slavery,  a  moral  question,  and  having  so  many  points  of 
practical  contact  with  the  Church,  nothing  is  more  natural  than 
the  supposition  that  it  would  oftentimes  find  its  way  into  the 
Church's  highest  convocations,  and  constrain  from  them  some  ex- 
pression of  opinion  as  to  its  true  character.  And  though  these 
deliverances  do  not  certainly  indicate  the  general  sentiment  that 
might  at  the  time  prevail,  yet  are  they  the  true  exponents  of  the 
Church's  feeling,  and  with  this  it  is  reasonable  to  infer  that  most 
good  men  agreed.  What,  then,  has  the  Church  of  Christ  in  former 
times  said  of  this  institution  ?  What  opinion  of  its  moral  charac- 
ter has  she  solemnly  promulgated  ?  We  well  know  that  now,  and 
for  some  years  past,  large  bodies  of  professed  Christians  in  this 
land,  have  given  to  slavery  their  unqualified  approval.  They  have 
pronounced  their  solemn  benediction  upon  it.  They  have  dared 
to  speak  of  it  as  a  divine  institution,  fraught  with  blessings  to  both 
of  the  parties  between  whom  it  subsists,  and  destined  to  continue 
until  the  latest  generation.  How  startling  the  contrast  between 
these  deliverances  of  the  modern  Church,  and  those  in  which  our 
fathers  and  theirs  once  all  together  united  !  The  following  minute 
was  adopted  by  the  Conference  of  the  Methodist  Episcopal  Church 
in  1784:— 

"Every  member  in  our  Society  who  has  slaves  in  those  States  where 
the  law  will  admit  of  freeing  them,  shall,  after  notice  given  him  by  the 
preacher,  set  them  free  within  twelve  months,  (except  in  Virginia, 
and  there  within  two  years,)  at  specified  periods,  according  to  age. 
Every  person  concerned  who  will  not  comply  with  these  rules,  shall 
have  liberty  to  withdraw  within  twelve  months  after  the  notice  is  given, 
otherwise  to  be  excluded.  No  person  holding  slaves  shall  in  future  be 
admitted  into  the  Society  until  he  previously  comply  with  these  rules 
respecting  slavery."f 

And  though  at  a  subsequent  Conference  these  regulations  were 

*  Benton's  Thirty  Years  in  the  U.  S.  Senate,  vol.  i.  p.  136. 
f  Lee's  History  of  the  Methodists. 


SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR.  37 

suspended,  yet  in  1797  this  paragraph  was  added  to  the  Discipline 
of  that  denomination  : — 

"The  preachers  aud  other  members  of  our  Society  are  requested  to 
consider  the  subject  of  negro  slavery  with  deep  attention,  and  that  they 
impart  to  the  General  Conference,  through  the  medium  of  the  Yearly 
Conference,  or  otherwise,  any  important  thoughts  on  the  subject,  that 
the  Conference  may  have  full  light,  in  order  to  take  further  steps  toward 
eradicating  this  enormous-  evil  from  that  part  of  the  Church  of  Christ 
and  God  with  which  they  are  connected."* 

At  a  meeting  of  the  General  Committee  of  the  Baptists  of  Yir- 
ginia,  in  1789,  the  following  resolution  was  adopted: — 

"Eesolved,  That  slavery  is  a  violent  deprivation  of  the  rights  of 
nature,  and  inconsistent  with  republican  government,  and  therefore  we 
recommend  it  to  our  brethren  to  make  use  of  every  measure  to  extir- 
pate this  horrid  evil  from  the  land,  and  pray  Almighty  God  that  our 
honorable  legislature  may  have  it  in  their  power  to  proclaim  this  great 
jubilee,  consistent  with  the  principles  of  good  policy."t 

The  General  Synod  of  the  Presbyterian  Church,  as  early  as  1787, 
recommended  "  in  the  warmest  terms  to  every  member  of  that 
body,  and  to  all  the  churches  and  families  under  their  care,  to  do 
everything  in  their  power,  consistent  with  the  rights  of  civil  society, 
to  promote  the  abolition  of  slavery,  and  the  instruction  of  negroes, 
whether  bond  or  free  ;"  and  four  years  after  the  organization  of 
the  first  General  Assembly,  (1793,)  that  body  expressed  their  ap- 
probation of  this  action,  by  ordering  that  it  be  published  in  their 
minutes.J  Two  years  later  than  this  (1795)  the  General  Assem- 
bly assured  "  all  the  churches  under  their  care  that  they  viewed 
with  the  deepest  concern  any  vestiges  of  slavery  which  may  exist 
in  this  country  ;"§  and  subsequently  (1815)  "  expressed  their  regret 
that  the  slavery  of  Africans  and  their  descendants  still  continues  in 
so  many  places,  and  even  among  those  within  the  bounds  of  the 
church."||  In  1818,  the  same  body  "having  taken  into  consider- 
ation the  subject  of  slavery,"  thus  "  make  known  their"  UNANIMOUS 
"sentiments  upon  it  to  the  churches  and  people  under  their  care." 

"  We  consider  the  voluntary  enslaving  of  one  part  of  the  human  race 
by  another  as  a  gross  violation  of  the  most  precious  and  sacred  rights  of 

*  Benezet,  Views  of  Slavery,  p.  102.  f  Ibid.,  p.  103. 

J  Assembly's  Digest,  p.  268.  \  Ibid.,  p.  269. 

||  Ibid.,  p.  271. 


38  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

human  nature,  as  utterly  inconsistent  with  the  law  of  God,  which  requires 
us  to  love  our  neighbor  as  ourselves,  and  as  totally  unreconcilable  with 
the  spirit  and  principles  of  the  Gospel  of  Christ,  which  enjoin  that  'All 
things  whatsoever  ye  would  that  men  should  do  to  you,  do  ye  even  so  to 
them.'  *  *  *  We  rejoice  that  the  Church  to  which  we  belong  com- 
menced as  early  as  any  other  in  this  country  the  good  work  of  endeavor- 
ing to  put  an  end  to  slavery,  and  that  in  the  same  work  many  of  its  mem- 
bers have  ever  since  been,  and  now  are  among  the  most  active,  vigorous, 
and  efficient  laborers.  *  *  *  We  earnestly  exhort  them  to  continue, 
and,  if  possible,  to  increase  their  exertion,  to  effect  the  total  abolition  of 
slavery."* 

Nor  were  these  solemn  denunciations  of  the  sin  of  slavery  con- 
fined to  the  highest  judicatory  of  the  church,  where,  it  might  be 
said,  that  Northern  influence  prevailed.  The  Synod  of  Kentucky, 
in  1835,  appointed  a  committee  "to  digest  and  prepare  a  plan  for 
the  moral  and  religious  instruction  of  our  slaves,  and  for  their 
future  emancipation,"  and  in  their  report,  adopted  the  year  fol- 
lowing, such  declarations  as  these  occur : — 

"We  all  admit  that  the  system  of  slavery,  which  exists  among  us,  is 
not  right.t  *  *  Without  any  crime  on  the  part  of  its  unfortunate 
subjects,  they  are  deprived  for  life,  and  their  posterity  after  them,  of  the 
right  to  property,  of  the  right  to  liberty,  of  the  right  to  personal  security. 
These  odious  features  are  not  the  excrescences  upon  the  system,  they  are 
the  system  itself ;  they  are  its  essential  constituent  parts.  And  can  any 
man  believe  that  auy  such  a  thing  as  this  is  not  sinful,  that  it  is  not  hated 
by  God,  and  ought  not  to  be  abhorred  and  abolished  by  man  ?+  * 
This  work  must  be  done,  or  wrath  will  come  upon  us.  The  groans  of 
millions  do  not  rise  forever  unheeded  before  the  throne  of  the  Almighty. 
The  hour  of  doom  must  soon  arrive,  the  storm  must  soon  gather,  the  bolt 
of  destruction  must  soon  be  hurled,  and  the  guilty  must  soon  be  dashed 
in  pieces.  The  voice  of  history  and  the  voice  of  inspiration  both  warri  us 
that  the  catastrophe  must  come,  unless  averted  by  repentance. "$ 

Such,  then,  until  quite  recently,  was  public  opinion  in  this 
country  upon  the  subject  of  slavery,  as  manifested,  in  the  spirit  of 
our  Congressional  debates,  and  in  the  deliverances  of  the  Christian 
Church.  Indeed,  a  distinguished  jurist,  whose1  researches  upon  this 
subject  entitle  his  opinion  to  peculiar  weight,  says,  "About  the  year 

*  Assembly's  Digest,  pp.  272,  273. 
|  Enormity  of  the  Slave-trade,  p.  76. 
J  Ibid.,  p.  81. 
\  Ibid.,  p.  108. 


SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR.  39 

1830,  for  the  first  time,  so  far  as  my  information  extends,  among 
men  of  the  least  political  repute,  it  was  announced  by  a  Governor 
of  South  Carolina  that  the  institution  of  slavery  was  eminently 
useful  and  beneficent."* 

Should  there  be  any  exception  to  this  remark,  many  things, 
which  we  need  not  here  stop  particularly  to  mention,  would 
point  to  Mr.  Calhoun,  the  distinguished  senator  of  the  same 
State.  The  "  Magnus  Apollo"  of  slavery  in  these  later  days, 
it  is  difficult  to  think  of  him  as  anything  else  than  its  stout  de- 
fender. And  yet  so  it  was.  Mr.  Calhoun  did  not  always  think 
that  American  slavery  was  a  benign  institution,  and  that  it  should 
be  perpetuated  in  this  laud.  He  was  a  convert,  like  all  his  other 
brethren  at  the  South,  to  a  new  doctrine  on  this  subject.  Of  this 
fact,  one  of  his  speeches  in  the  Senate,  in  1838,  contains  almost  a 
confession  :  "  Many,"  he  says,  "  in  the  South  once  believed  that 
slavery  was  a  moral  and  political  evil,  but  that  folly  and  delusion 
are  gone.  We  now  see  it  in  its  true  light,  and  regard  it  as  the 
most  safe  and  stable  basis  for  free  institutions."  A  member  of 
President  Monroe's  cabinet,  when  the  Missouri  Compromise  was 
proposed,  Mr.  Calhoun  also  gave  to  that  measure  his  cordial  appro- 
bation ;f  and  as  late  as  1837  declared  in  the  Senate  "that  it  was 
due  to  candor  to  say  that  his  impressions  were  in  its  favor.  "| 

A  recent  writer  thus  reports  a  conversation  that  this  distinguished 
Southerner  had,  "more  than  twenty  years  ago,"  with  "a  philo- 
sophic observer,  never  absorbed  in  politics,  and  who  visited  Wash- 
ington as  a  young  man  with  good  introductions,  after  his  return 
from  a  long  tour  of  observation  in  Europe." 

"  Sir,  people  believe  that  I  am  an  unqualified  advocate  of  slavery — 
that  I  hold  the  institution  to  be  permanent  and  just.  This,  sir,  is  an 
error.  I  have  no  faith  in  slavery  as  a,  permanent  institution,  nor  as  a 
true  one.  I  believe  it  to  be  but  temporary,  it  serves  a  present  purpose ; 
it  is  very  important  to  maintain  it  while  it  serves  this  purpose,  and  for 
this  reason  I  defend  and  uphold  it;  but  I  am  no  believer  in.no  advocate 
of  slavery  in  itself;  it  is  an  institution  which  is  destined  to  come  to  an 
end  and  disappear,  like  so  many  others,  after  having  fulfilled  its  mis- 


Stroud's  Laws  of  Slavery,  Preface  to  Second  Edition,  p.  6. 
Benton's  Thirty  Years  in  II   S.  Senate,  vol.  i.  p.  744. 
Ibid.,  vol.  ii.  p.  136. 
Independent,  December  25th,  1862. 


40  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

But  this  is  not  all.  There  is  a  fact  in  the  life  of  Mr.  Calhoun, 
remarkable  in  itself,  and  in  the  highest  degree  pertinent  to  the 
point  we  are  now  illustrating,  that  recently  came  to  the  knowledge 
of  the  writer  of  this  article,  and  though  no  public  announcement  of 
it  may  have  ever,  before  this,  been  made,  yet  of  its  truthfulness 
there  can  be  no  doubt.  While  on  a  visit  to  the  North,  in  the  sum- 
mer of  1821  or  1822,  Mr.  Calhoun  was  frequently  in  the  society  of 
an  eminent  Presbyterian  divine.  The  acquaintance  that  had  for 
many  years  existed  between  the  two  men,  invited  in  their  interviews 
the  fullest  and  frankest  expressions  of  opinion,  and  this  was  doubt- 
less still  further  promoted  by  their  entire  diversity  of  pursuits. 
The  theme  that  engrossed  a  large  part  of  their  conversation  was 
naturally  the  institution  of  American  slavery,  for  in  the  admission 
of  Missouri  as  a  slaveholding  State  into  the  Union,  we  had  just 
as  a  nation  came  through  our  first  great  struggle  on  that  subject. 
In  everything,  however,  that  was  said  upon  this  theme,  Mr.  Cal- 
houn attempted  no  defense  of  the  system,  but,  on  the  contrary, 
unhesitatingly  pronounced  it  to  be  a  great  evil,  both  morally  and 
politically.  At  these  declarations  the  divine  expressed  surprise, 
and  urged  that  the  distinguished  Southerner,  as  he  was  certainly 
greatly  misunderstood  on  this  subject,  should  give  to  them  some 
public  expression.  And  as  a  definite  mode,  he  suggested  the  prep- 
aration by  him  of  a  bill  for  the  abolition  of  slavery,  either  gradual 
or  immediate,  in  the  District  of  Columbia.  The  property  of  the 
whole  country,  and  the  seat  of  our  national  government,  the  divine 
pressed  upon  Mr.  Calhoun,  the  desirableness  of  its  being  entirely 
unpolluted  by  the  touch  of  slavery.  At  first  the  argument  seemed 
to  be  little  heeded,  but  at  length,  upon  the  condition  that  the 
measure  should  be  entirely  a  Southern  one,  come  from  the  South, 
and  receive  its  advocacy,  Mr.  Calhoun  consented  to  prepare  such 
a  bill,  and  arranged  with  his  friend  to  visit  Washington,  whenever 
he  should  inform  him  that  the  details  of  the  measure  had  been  pre- 
pared. Nor  was  the  promise  forgotten.  In  the  winter  following 
these  interviews,  Mr.  Calhoun  summoned  his  friend  to  the  capitol, 
informing  him  of  his  readiness  to  proceed  with  the  proposed 
measure.  The  divine  immediately  complied  with  the  invitation.  He 
went  to  Washington,  saw  Mr.  Calhoun,  at  his  request,  solicited 
two  prominent  Northern  politicians  to  give  to  the  proposed  measure 
their  influence ;  and  was,  as  he  supposed,  on  the  very  eve  of  suc- 
cess, when  suddenly  the  distinguished  Southerner  refused  to  take 
another  step  in  the  matter,  alleging  as  his  reason  the  violent  anti- 


SLAVERY   AND   THE    WAR.  41 

slavery  feeling,  that  was  then  just  beginning  to  manifest  itself  in 
some  portions  of  New  England.* 

But  from  this  view  of  the  opposition  to  slavery,  that  was  once 
almost  universal  in  this  land,  it  is  time  that  we  should  turn,  to  in- 
quire, for  a  moment,  into  the  causes  of  that  strange  and  marvelous 
change  of  sentiment  that  has,  on  this  subject,  recently  taken  place. 
For  whatever  may,  in  our  early  history,  have  been  public  opinion 
on  this  great  question,  no  one  can  doubt  but  that  there  are  few  now, 
at  the  South,  at  least,  who  condemn  this  institution.  Among 
Southern  statesmen  we  look  in  vain  for  the  men,  who,  in  their  views 
of  slavery,  sympathize  with  Patrick  Henry,  Washington,  Jefferson, 
Madison,  or  of  any  of  the  other  fathers  of  our  republic ;  and  we 
know  of  no  prominent  divine  at  the  South,  who  would  now  vote  for 
such  a  deliverance  upon  this  subject,  as  was  the  unanimous  utter- 
ance of  the  General  Assembly  of  the  Presbyterian  Church  in  1818. 
Upon  this  great  moral  question,  millions  of  people  have,  in  thirty 
years,  or  a  little  more,  radically  changed  their  sentiments.  In  this 
age  of  progress  in  art,  education,  and  religion,  we  have  beheld  the 
strange  phenomenon  of  whole  States,  converted  from  the  opponents 
of  involuntary  servitude,  into  its  stoutest  defenders.  Toward  the 
great  idea  of  universal  liberty  and  equality,  the  race  at  large  has, 
for  the  last  half  century,  been  steadily  advancing.  In  the  old 
world  these  principles  battling  with  oppression  has,  from  many 
of  its  seats  of  power,  hurled  it  into  the  dust.  Even  in  Russia 
serfdom  has  been  abolished.  It  is  in  enlightened  and  Christian 
America  alone,  that  the  moral  tone  of  society  seems,  in  this  respect, 
to  have  been  lowered,  that  the  public  conscience  has  deteriorated, 
and  that  men  have  gone  back,  in  their  ideas  of  human  rights,  to 
barbaric  ages. 

But  how  was  this  sad  change  effected  ?  What  were  the  influ- 
ences most  potent  in  producing  it  ? 

*  The  writer  of  this  article  is  fully  aware  of  the  fact,  that  the  public 
will  be  slow  to  believe  such  a  statement  as  this.  We  are  all  justly  incred- 
ulous with  reference  to  any  alleged  fact,  in  the  history  of  a  public  man,  that 
is  new,  and  in  opposition  to  the  generally  received  estimate  of  his  opinions.  It 
is  proper,  therefore,  definitely  to  state  the  authority  upon  which  the  above 
statement  is  made.  The  facts  were  mentioned  to  the  writer  by  the  "distin- 
guished divine"  himself,  in  conversation  some  years  since.  They  are,  like- 
wise, contained  in  a  letter,  written  at  his  dictation,  and  dated , 

October  6th,  1862.  In  this  letter  permission  is  given  to  the  author  to  pub- 
lish these  facts.  He  regrets  that  he  has  not  the  liberty  of  adding  the  name 
of  the  eminent  divine. 


42  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

By  many  the  whole  problem  is  supposed  to  be  solved,  by  the  sim- 
ple fact  of  the  intemperate,  and,  oftentimes,  uncharitable  discussion 
of  this  subject  at  the  North.  From  the  opponents  of  slavery,  the 
whole  South  became  its  friends,  we  are  told,  because  men,  who  had 
no  personal  contact  with,  or  interest  in  this  institution,  indeed,  who 
lived  hundreds  of  miles  from  it,  violently  condemned  it;  wrote  un- 
kindly and  hastily  about  it ;  petitioned  Congress  either  to  abolish  it, 
or  to  prevent  its  extension ;  sought  to  bring  odium  upon  all  who  were 
in  anyway  engaged  in  it;  and  finally  endeavored  even  to  excite  to 
a  bloody  insurrection  those  who  were  in  bondage.  Had  these  men 
attended  to  their  own  concerns,  had  the  Northern  press  and  pulpit 
been  silent  on  this  subject,  or  had  their  utterances  been  more  kind 
and  considerate,  we  are  assured  that  we  would  never  have  wit- 
nessed that  strange  revolution  of  sentiment  to  which  we  have  just 
referred. 

But  is  this  so  ?  Is  this  cause  sufficient  to  produce  such  an 
effect  ?  We  say  nothing  in  reply  of  the  admitted  fact  that  the 
men  who  thus  spoke  and  wrote,  constituted  but  a  small  minority  of 
the  whole  people  of  the  North — we  willingly  waive  this  important 
consideration — nor  would  we  yet  again,  here  express  any  opinion 
as  to  their  conduct,  whether  it  was  in  itself  right  or  wrong,  for  its 
influence  might  in  either  case,  be  the  same  We  would  rather  accept 
the  most  exaggerated  statement  that  on  this  subject  can  be  made, 
and  unite  in  the  severest  condemnation  of  such  conduct,  while  we 
yet  assert  that,  as  a  cause,  it  is  altogether  inadequate  to  the  effect. 
What !  nine  millions  of  people,  radically  changed  in  sentiment 
.upon  a  great  moral  question,  converted  to  the  most  obstinate  de- 
fense of  slavery,  brought  to  the  point  of  regarding  that  institution 
as  divine,  and  a  blessing  to  both  of  the  parties  between  whom  it 
subsists,  because  a  number  of  men,  as  large  as  themselves,  and 
certainly  their  peers  in  intelligence  and  piety,  regarded  it  as  wicked, 
said  so,  and  were  unceasing,  and,  we  will  add,  unscrupulous,  in 
their  efforts  to  destroy  it !  Can  any  candid  man  believe  that  such 
a  thing  is  possible  ?  That  the  feelings  of  the  South  have  been 
deeply  wounded  by  what  they  regarded  as  the  meddlesomeness  of 
the  North  with  their  peculiar  institution,  that  they  have  been 
chafed  and  irritated  by  it,  that  they  have  regarded  themselves  as 
maligned,  and  that  this  conviction  of  injured  innocence  has,  in  some 
cases,  led  them  to  defend  what,  in  other  circumstances,  they  would 
have  condemned,  we  cheerfully  admit.  The  result  of  persecution, 
either  real  or  supposed,  is,  perhaps,  always  to  endear  to  men  that 


SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR.  43 

for  which  they  are  persecuted,  and  to  lead  them  to  stand  up  more 
stoutly  in  its  defense.  But  one  entire  section  of  a  great  country 
revolutionized  in  sentiment  upon  a  moral  question,  led  to  believe 
that  a  domestic  institution  was  right  that  previously  they  had 
regarded  as  wrong,  because  the  other  section  condemned  it,  and 
labored  and  prayed  for  its  abolition,  is  not  the  very  idea  prepos- 
terous ! 

Suppose  the  case  to  be  reversed ;  suppose  the  whole  South  to  have 
arraigned  itself,  in  the  most  violent  opposition,  to  the  manufacture 
and  sale  of  intoxicating  drinks  at  the  North,  can  we  conceive  that 
we  here  would  have  all  become  the  champions  of  this  traffic,  and 
boldly  affirmed  it  to  be  morally  right  ?  It  is  time  that  the  idea  we 
are  considering  should  be  exploded.  It  has  dwelt  long  enough  in 
the  bosoms  of  good  men,  as  a  sufficient  apology,  for  one  of  the  most 
marvelous  changes  of  sentiment  that  the  world  has  ever  witnessed. 
We  must  look  further,  and  deeper,  for  the  real  cause  of  this  sad 
effect. 

In  the  case  of  a  single  individual,  we  are  all  aware  of  the  in- 
fluence, that  is  exerted  upon  the  moral  judgment,  by  a  long  con- 
tinuance in  any  line  of  conduct,  or  mode  of  life,  that  is  once  felt 
to  be  either  positively  wrong,  or  of  doubtful  propriety.  As  men 
live  in  the  practice  of  sin,  they  lose  both  the  consciousness,  and  the 
belief  of  its  sinfulness.  Self  conditions  faith.  The  power  that 
perceives  a  wicked  act,  partakes  of  the  general  injury  that  that 
act,  when  performed,  inflicts  on  the  soul.  As  character  deterio- 
rates, so  does  the  standard  by  which  we  judge  of  it.  A  man's 
own  moral  state  and  life  is  very  much  the  measure  of  his  moral 
convictions.  Let  any  one  have  his  conscience  so  enlightened,  as 
to  perceive  that  a  certain  pursuit  in  which  he  is  engaged  is  wrong, 
but,  despite  that,  let  him  still  continue  in  it,  and  in  time  he  will  be 
very  prone,  not  only  to  lose  all  convictions  of  its  wickedness,  but 
really  to  marvel  how  he  could  have  ever  cherished,  with  regard  to 
it,  such  an  opinion.  It  is  by  this  principle  alone,  that  we  can  ex- 
plain the  fact,  that  those  most  apt  in  this  world  to  justify  them- 
selves, and  in  conscious  innocence  to  say,  "we  have  no  sin,"  are 
ordinarily  the  most  depraved.  They  have  gone  on  so  far  in  sin 
that  it  has  become  a  "hidden  thing"  to  them.  Their  moral  sense 
is  paralyzed.  "  In  the  lowered  temperature  of  the  inward  con- 
sciousness, they  have  reached  that  point,  where  the  growing  cold- 
ness, hardness,  and  selfishness  of  a  man's  nature  can  no  longer  be 
noted ;  the  mechanism  by  which  moral  variations  are  indicated, 
having  become  itself  insensible  and  motionless." 


44  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

The  principle  is  applicable  to  the  case  before  us,  and  in  it  may 
be  found  one  potent  cause  for  the  effect  which  we  have  described. 
There  was  a  time,  in  the  history  of  this  country,  when  the  conscience 
of  the  South  was  so  enlightened,  as  to  see  that  slavery  was  a  great 
moral  evil.  Her  statesmen  saw  it,  and  did  not  hesitate  to  pro- 
claim it.  Her  divines  saw  it,  and  did  not  draw  back,  in  the  de- 
liverances of  the  church,  from  uniting  with  others  in  condemning 
it.  But,  alas,  to  these  convictions,  expressed  in  political  speeches, 
and  church  deliverances,  there  was  no  corresponding  action. 
Slavery,  seen  to  be  an  evil,  was  not  immediately  abolished,  nor 
were  any  plans  devised  by  which  it  might  ultimately  be  destroyed. 
On  the  contrary,  the  institution  was  retained.  Southern  society, 
instead  of  seeking  to  cast  off  this  net- work  of  evil,  or  to  loosen  the 
coils  in  which  it  was  inwrapping  it,  suffered  it  to  remain,  and  every 
day  to  tighten  its  grasp.  The  difficulties  in  the  way  of  the  eman- 
cipation of  the  enslaved  were  so  exaggerated,  as  to  be  regarded  as 
forever  insurmountable.  The  behests  of  conscience  were  destroyed. 
The  monitions  of  the  moral  sense  were  disregarded.  Men  went 
on  doing  what  they  knew  to  be  wrong.  They  wilfully  continued 
in  sin.  And,  from  such  conduct,  is  it  any  marvel  that,  in  time, 
just  such  results  followed  as  we  have  described  ?  Refusing  to  do 
anything  for  the  freedom  of  the  enslaved,  when  conscious  that 
duty  demanded  it,  is  it  strange  that  that  bondage  should  finally 
come  itself  to  be  regarded  as  right  ? 

We  are  well  aware  of  the  seriousness  of  the  charge  that  we  thus 
bring  against  the  South.  In  what  we  have  said,  we  aver  nothing 
less,  on  this  point,  than  their  demoralization.  We  affirm  that  they 
are  now  the  defenders  of  African  slavery,  because  of  a  paralysis  of 
their  conscience,  produced  by  the  long  continuance  of  this  institu- 
tion, after  its  true  character  was  known.  But  can  any  candid 
mind  doubt  that  this  position  is  true  ?  Is  it  not  a  conclusion 
logically  irresistible  ?  Do  we  not  see  the  same  principle  repeating 
itself  in  the  moral  judgment  of  individuals  all  around  us  ?  To 
work  a  radical  change,  in  the  opinion  of  a  man,  upon  the  moral 
character  of  any  action,  is  there  anything  more  efficient  than  its 
habitual  performance,  after  his  conscience  has  once  been  enlight- 
ened to  know  that  it  is  wrong  ? 

But  other  causes  have  conspired,  with  the  one  just  mentioned, 
in  producing  this  wonderful  revolution  of  sentiment  at  the  South, 
with  regard  to  slavery.  During  our  colonial  history,  and  for  the 
first  few  years  of  our  existence  as  a  separate  nation,  when,  as  we 


SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR.  45 

have  seen,  the  anti-slavery  feeling  was  so  strong,  we,  have  already 
had  occasion  to  refer  to  the  fact,  that  the  growth  of  cotton  in  this 
country  was  inconsiderable.  A  writer  in  the  Penny  Cyclopaedia 
presents  us  with  this  brief  summary  of  facts  : — 

"  In  1786  the  total  imports  of  cotton  to  the  British  isles  was  some- 
what less  than  20,000,000  pounds,  no  part  of  which  was  furnished  by 
North  America.  Our  West  India  colonies  supplied  nearly  one-third, 
about  an  equal  quantity  was  brought  from  foreign  colonies  in  the  same 
quarter,  2,000,000  pounds  came  from  Brazil,  and  5,000,000  pounds  from 
the  Levant.  In  1790  the  importation  amounted  to  31,447,605  pounds, 
none  of  which  was  supplied  by  the  United  States.  In  1795  the  quantity 
was  only  26,401,340  pounds.  In  this  year  a  commercial  treaty  was 
made  between  the  United  States  of  North  America  and  Great  Britain, 
by  one  article  of  which,  as  it  originally  stood,  the  export  was  prohibited 
from  the  United  States,  in  American  vessels,  of  such  articles  as  they 
had  previously  imported  from  the  West  Indies.  Among  these  articles 
cotton  was  included;  Mr.  Jay,  the  American  negotiator,  not  being 
aware  that  cotton  was  then  becoming  an  article  of  export  from  the 
United  States.  In  1800  the  imports  had  more  than  doubled,  having 
reached  56,010,732  pounds.  Tliis  was  the  first  year  (1800)  in  which 
any  considerable  quantity  was  obtained  from  America,  the  imports 
from  that  quarter  were  about  16,000,000  pounds."* 

But  it  happened  that  about  this  time,  several  causes  came  into  <* 

operation  which,  in  their  effect,  greatly  increased,  both  the  demand 
for  cotton  abroad,  and  its  cultivation  in  this  country.  It  was  now 
that  the  inventions  of  Hargreaves,  Arkwright,  Crompton,  and 
others,  in  cotton-spinning,  were  made,  enabling  English  artisans 
successfully  to  compete  with  the  weavers  of  India ;  and  that  the 
steam  engine,  having  undergone  the  improvements  of  Watt,  was 
first  applied  on  a  large  scale  to  manufacturing  industry.  It  was, 
likewise,  at  this  time,  that  Whitney  invented  his  saw-gin,  an  in- 
vention which  strikingly  supplemented  those  of  which  we  have  just 
spoken,  and  without  which  we,  as  a  people,  could  have  done  little  to- 
ward supplying  that  increased  demand  for  cotton  which  these  inven- 
tions of  English  artisans,  had  produced.  Before  this,  the  only  cotton 
grown  in  America  which  was  available  for  the  general  purposes  of 
commerce,  was  that  which  was  known  as  the  Sea-Island  kind.  But 
this  variety  grew  only  in  a  few  favored  localities,  and  the  quantity 
produced  could  never  of  necessity  be  large.  The  difficulty  of 
separating  the  seed  from  the  wool,  by  any  methods  then  in  use, 

*  Article  Cotton. 


46  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

was  so  great  in  the  other  varieties  of  cotton  that  conld  be  grown 
on  this  continent,  as  to  render  them  of  little  value  for  the  ordinary 
purposes  of  trade.  But  this  difficulty  the  invention  of  Whitney  so 
completely  overcome,  as  at  once  to  bring  into  general  demand  the 
whole  American  crop.*  In  a  suit  brought  by  Whitney,  in  Savan- 
nah, in  1807,  to  sustain  the  validity  of  his  patent,  Judge  Johnson 
thus  speaks  of  the  importance  of  this  invention,  and  of  its  influence 
upon  the  industrial  interests  of  the  South  : — 

"The  whole  interior  of  the  Southern  States  was  languishing,  and  its 
inhabitants  emigrating  for  want  of  some  object  to  engage  their  atten- 
tion and  employ  their  industry,  when  the  invention  of  this  machine  at 
once  opened  views  to  them  which  set  the  whole  country  in  active  motion. 
From  childhood  to  age  it  has  presented  to  us  a  lucrative  employment. 
Individuals  who  were  depressed  with  poverty  and  sunk  in  idleness,  have 
suddenly  risen  to  wealth  and  respectability.  Our  debts  have  been  paid 
off,  our  capitals  have  increased,  and  our  lands  trebled  themselves  in 
value."f 

Moreover,  it  should  here  be  remarked,  that  African  slavery,  to 
be  economical  and  permanent,  must  be  applied  to  the  production 
of  some  commodity  which,  while  it  is  greatly  in  demand,  requires 
only  crude  labor.  In  the  more  difficult  industrial  arts  it  cannot 
be  profitably  and  safely  employed,  the  general  awakening  of  the 
faculties,  intellectual  and  moral,  produced  by  such  pursuits,  inevi- 
tably disqualifying  men  for  a  servile  condition.  But  cotton  is  a 
commodity  which  fulfills  these  conditions. 

And  of  these  combined  influences,  the  result  was  precisely  what 
we  should  have  anticipated.  The  Slave  States  became  cotton- 
growing  States.  That  plant,  which  heretofore  had  been  culti- 
vated mainly  in  the  gardens  of  the  South,  and  whose  growth,  for 
the  purposes  of  trade,  had  been  limited  to  a  narrow  belt  of  land 
running  along  the  coast  of  South  Carolina,  now  whitened  scores 
of  acres  far  inland.  It  was  exported  to  Europe.  It  came  into 
successful  competition  with  that  which  had  been  grown  in  other 
countries.  By  its  superior  quality  and  low  price,  it  gradually 
commanded  for  itself  almost  the  whole  market.  Europe  began 
now  to  look  to  America  for  her  supply  of  this  great  staple  of 
trade,  and  its  growth  elsewhere  began  materially  to  decline. 

Moreover,  through  this  exportation,  the  South  was  enabled  to 

*  See  Cairnes'  Slave  Power,  p.  106. 

•}•  American  Journal  of  Science,  vol.  xxi. 


SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR.  47 

command  the  industrial  resources  of  all  commercial  nations.  With- 
out cultivating  for  herself  any  art,  or  engaging  in  any  skilled  labor 
— as  indeed  she  could  not  with  her  slaves  do — she  was  yet  able, 
through  an  exchange  with  other  countries,  to  secure  the  products 
of  the  highest  manufacturing  and  mechanical  skill.  Wealth,  too, 
was  thus  secured  to  the  slaveholders  of  the  South.  The  value  of 
cotton  exported  from  this  country,  in  1858,  has  been  estimated  at 
nearly  one  hundred  and  thirty-two  millions  of  dollars,*  and  to  this 
must  be  added  the  sum  realized  from  sales  at  home. 

And  from  the  commencement  of  this  process,  near  the  opening 
of  the  present  century,  it  has  been  steadily  going  on.  The  fol- 
lowing table — prepared  after  consulting  all  the  authorities  within 
our  reach,  and  containing  the  total  production  of  raw  cotton  in 
every  part  of  our  globe,  together  with  the  whole  amount  of  the 
crop  grown  in  the  United  States,  at  intervals  of  ten  years — will 
perhaps  present  this  subject  more  forcibly  than  we  could  do  in 
words.  In  its  examination,  we  beg  that  our  readers  will  observe 
how  impressively  it  teaches  us  these  two  great  facts :  the  aston- 
ishing rapidity  with  which  this  trade  has  grown  at  the  South,  and 
the  almost  complete  monopoly  of  it  which  at  last  was  attained : — 


Tears. 

Amount  grown  in  thft 
United  States. 

Total  production  of  raw 
cotton. 

1791  

Ibs. 
2,000,000 

Ibs. 
490,000,000 

1801  

48,000,000 

620,000,000 

1811  

80,000,000 

555,000,000 

1821  

180,000,000 

630,000,000 

1831  

385,000,000 

820,000,000 

1841  

740,000,000 

980,000,000 

1851  

1,036,000,000 

1,242,000,000 

And  now  these  facts,  have  they  no  connection  with  that  great 
revolution  of  sentiment,  with  regard  to  the  moral  character  of 
slavery,  that  has  taken  place  at  the  South  ?  Can  any  man  think 
of  them  together,  and  believe  that  they  are  in  no  way  related? 
When  a  business  becomes  highly  profitable,  is  anything  more  com- 
mon among  men  than  the  conviction  of  its  rightfulness  ?  A  self- 
interested  casuistry,  is  it  not  very  prone  to  call  in  unsound  pleas, 
and  reasons,  and  excuses  which,  constantly  pressing  the  line  that 


*  New  American  Cyclopaedia,  article  Cotton. 


48  SLAVERY   AND   THE   WAR. 

divides  right  from  wrong,  at  last  wholly  removes  it  ?  In  asserting 
this,  we  do  nothing  more  than  attribute  to  the  South  the  foibles  of 
our  common  humanity.  The  spectacle  of  either  an  individual,  or 
a  nation  condemning  that  which  enriches  them,  is  very  rare  in  this 
world  of  sin.  Lord  Bacon  says :  "  I  cannot  call  riches  better 
than  the  baggage  of  virtue — the  Roman  word  is  better,  'impedi- 
menta'— for,  as  the  baggage  is  to  an  army,  so  is  riches  to  virtue, 
*  *  it  hindereth  the  march ;  *  *  yea,  it  sometimes  loseth 
or  disturbeth  the  victory."* 

What  a  sad  illustration  of  this  truth  do  we  discover  in  the  his- 
tory of  this  nation !  With  no  great  staple  of  trade  that  could 
be  profitably  cultivated  by  slave  labor,  and  that  was  rapidly 
enriching  the  South,  the  institution  of  American  slavery  was 
almost  universally  condemned !  With  such  a  commodity,  and  in 
the  possession  of  the  monopoly  of  it,  slavery  is  believed  to  be 
right ;  and,  for  its  preservation  and  extension,  it  is  thought  to  be 
no  crime  to  deluge  our  country  with  blood,  destroy  our  nationality, 
and  extinguish  to  the  world  the  last  hope  of  free  government. 


*  Lord  Bacon's  Works,  vol.  i.  p.  42. 


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